Caught the tail end of the weather forecast for today last night. The present was warning us about colder weather to come. It is winter, I can deal with colder weather. What I find it harder to deal with is the omnipresent gloom and dampness that Britain is so often cast into.
So it was with welcome relief when I woke to a morning of blue skies and crisp, clear, winter light. Emma still has a head that is full of cold, and worse it appears to have spread to an ear infection, so whilst she stays warm with her Phil Collins biography and the pretend fire, I muck out Bicester Zoo. Whilst I work in the garden, sprinkling liberal amounts of rabbit droppings (mainly I think from Woody rather than Cecily) on the vegetable patch, there are redwings for company in the garden and it is beautiful.
For lunch we have slabs of buttered bread and turkey soup. After which I accompany Emma to the emergancy doctor at the cottage hospital. The cottage hospital – I think beaurocracy now calls these places community hospitals – must be about two years old now and I have as of yet never been inside. A new hospital is a piece of new architecture that you see go up and wonder what it like but hope that you have no reason to enter into to see. As it turns out, the part that I have seen is clean, tidy, and utiliarian in a way that all new hospitals and doctors surgeries have.
On our way home, Emma felt like she has been a caged lion in her own home on an otherwise beautiful day so we stop at our local nature reserve for a short stroll in the last of the setting sun.
I am feeling a little bit resentful of the inevitable fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow. I like my day job, it’s not that I don’t, it’s just that I really do think I could be happy spending my days reading my books, and cooking, and being out in nature, and writing my stories. I think part of my resentfulness is the feeling that I have frittered away my time off, and not made the most of it. This is of course complete rubbish, but I feel is a thought brough on by the fact that since I wrote over 20,000 words to my novel during November I have not written a single sentence and it is now January already. I feel that I should have written something during the last three weeks.