New Year!

So much for New Year!  A happy one to you all, by the way! I didn’t get to celebrate other than with a medicinal hot toddy raised in a toast with the folk from the party at Edinburgh Castle on the telly!  After my walk along the riverside last week  I caught a cold – one of these horrible chesty coughing  and snuffling ones that tires you out and won’t let you sleep when you lie down.  I have coughed till I am sore, and my nose must surely resemble that of Santa Claus’s good friend Rudolph.  I’m still suffering, and continue to languish on my sick bed(well, sofa/settee/couch), supping chicken soup on the advice of my Jewish pen-friend, and wolfing down the Benylin!  I’d like to say I was getting better, but I’ve felt better on the last couple of days only to wake up next morning with equally sore sinuses, and coughing – well you really don’t need to know about the coughing!

Then there’s the snow!  There’s just too much of it now!  It’s gone on too long!  I’m fed up with it, despite how I said it was so pretty the other day!  I guess it IS still pretty – looking out on it -  but I’m getting tired of seeing all that white.  I want it to go away – which it won’t be doing for a while, judging by the weather forecasts!  We’ve had snow falls every day for the last few days, and I haven’t been able to get out to clear down my steps to the garden, let alone up the steps to the street – somewhere I haven’t seen for a while!  Oh well, if I wait long enough maybe it will thaw and disappear by itself!  And, yes, before anyone says anything I know we had snow like this every year when I was a child and I know some of you will have it worse than this every winter, but ….. well, just, but….!

Here’s how it looked outside my window late this morning!  The sun didn’t really manage to get through the mist at all, so it’s quite dreary.  Not a soul about!   All is quiet! – only the occasional crow cawing from one of the trees or from my chimney pot! I can hear the sound in the chimney!

Talking of birds, I don’t think I told you about the bird that collided with my living room window!  I don’t know when it happened, but it was the morning after I came back from France that I noticed the dirty pane.  Looking closer there was the complete imprint of a bird on the glass: wings outstretched, short tail, roundish body and  face….  I think it has to have been an owl.  I took a photo later.  Looks like an owl, eh?  Poor thing!  Bet it got a sore head!

They say owls often do crash into windows, but I’ve no idea what happened to it!  Was it killed or merely stunned?  I haven’t seen Sally downstairs to ask her what she knows! 

Anyway, I’ve written enough for today!  My head’s hurting with all this concentration!!!!  Time for a snooze, I think.

Talk again soon…..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!