Relapsing ...

Actually, I've relapsed. It's 11.40pm. I think I probably write a great deal better earlier in the day, just as I do my Italian far more accurately in the morning, buy things online in a more considered way in the morning ... Hey Ho.

Much of today was dry. Not, right enough, sufficiently early to hang out washing - other than a dripping item -  but there was some sunshine, it was mild, and when we finally got round to going for a walk the radar had no precipitation until well after dark. (It's pouring now; the night echoes to the sound of running water and ... drips.) The morning, however, became somewhat filled up with domesticity: Himself was vacuuming under our bed, a marathon task because I have so many boxes and storage trolleys stashed there; I was tackling the sink and its fittings and wondering if our local water supply is particularly favourable for growing mildew and other black gunk in the interstices that I usually overlook. I did, however, fit in a decent whack at the Italian; I'm beginning to realise that I really have learned quite a bit and can usually do really well at aural tests - which is actually the most useful part of the whole thing as far as I'm concerned.

Sudden musing: why is it that I am so unwilling just to let time pass? Like Philip Larkin's "time torn off unused"? Will this sense stay with me till the end? How difficult that could become ...

Later, not wanting to fester indoors any more, we went down to Toward again and did the same walk up the farm road as we did last week. That's where I took the photo; there are no dramatic snowy mountains or dazzling sunsets, but there is a huge sky with still some suggestion of light in it, and there is silence, and the smell of silage, and the sense of emptiness. 

My tree and cards are still up, as the Feast of the Epiphany comes to an end. Giles Brandreth is leaving his up till Candlemas, but I shall take mine down tomorrow. As I do, I shall be remembering that time when I was dismantling our tree in the sitting room of our first flat in Glasgow, in the knowledge that by the time another Christmas came we'd be living in a house I'd never seen, in a town I only knew from day trips, with a baby who wasn't yet born. It felt very strange.

And so, to channel Pepys, to bed.