Towering peaks

I've surprised myself by choosing this photo, cut in half by a dense window frame, to record Sunday morning's weather. I have more attractive ones, taken a little later from outside the door or up on the balcony, but this is the one which best conveys my astonishment when I came down to the back of the house to find ground and trees heavy with frost, the valley and downs lost in dense grey mist, and this huge, dense bank of clouds towering seamlessly out of the fog like great mountain peaks. Later the fog thinned, and I photographed the pretty, muted colours of our view, green and brown fields and hedgerows through a layer of frost; later still, sleet and wet snow fell, giving a thin, messy coating on the grass and deck; and after dark it started to snow more heavily, forming a more significant covering by morning. Snow before Christmas is unusual here, and infrequent enough at any time to generate excitement. We missed the worst of it, hearing later about closed motorways just a little further west, and I was again grateful that I no longer have to worry about commuting to work on treacherous roads.