On Wednesday I went to Tesco with my mother. I should have enjoyed it more at the time, because it looks like it was my last outing for quite a while. Last night there was another six to eight inches of snow, and I think we might count as snowed in.
We did actually go out yesterday evening. My father has been in China at a conference on biodiversity, not Graun-style whole ecosystems biodiversity but the biodiversity of some particular species or groups of species of shrub. It's important to have lots of genotypes. His flight back was diverted from Heathrow to Edinburgh, and he was very lucky to get a flight down to Exeter airport. However, that meant my mother had to collect him. I didn't want her to go alone because it was forecast to be minus seven last night, so we loaded the car with shovels, blankets, foodstuffs and grit, and headed off. It took us twenty minutes to get 200 yards to the pub -- luckily for us our nextdoor neighbours came and helped me push the car over the difficult bits. Anyway we did eventually get him home, and though we couldn't get the car back in the drive at least we left it out of people's way. But it made it clear just how unlikely it is that we're going anywhere. If I got appendicitis I expect I could, eventually, be got to a hospital, but short of that extreme measure I'm stuck here. And I can't see the hills from my window.
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| Desk view: note lack of distant hills | |
Even my dad's bamboo is holding a surprising amount of snow:
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| Spot the blue tit |
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Here's the gate to the garden and paddock.
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| The theme is snow |
To photograph this teasel I walked into snow deeper than my wellies.
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| Snow is heavy |
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There are also some icicles, which are quite pretty, and which are melting in an encouraging fashion.
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| Plink |
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Anyway I'm not going out again without my sunglasses.
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