PAST THE SHORTEST DAY, BLOWN AWAY

Past the darkest and dreariest and so on day. Now we have the morning closing in for a while and then . . .
We have snowdrops and a few are showing white petals! It is still in the teens Centigrade in the daytime. (Oh! and wet.) Talking strange events - snowdrops thinking it is spring before the New Year - our Liquidambar, the small tree with the October glory of redness, is still largely green - it has not found its autumn. 

We also have roses still out - we took some to church when we did the flowers and it went down well. They were put on the piano as part of an arrangement with variegated mint (still in leaf) and winter flowering viburnum. 

This is the view where the tree was, over one of the sheds to the back field. The blue box in the window is empty but was used to transport some Sci-fi books when we moved house. I sold many of them to a bookshop in Wigtown, the Scottish book town.

The tree now looks like this stacked against the wall, ends open so the wood can dry out but with a cover to stop the worst of our wet weather penetrating.

The grasses still have some green in but are looking ragged and messy especially this miscanthus and the Stipa gigantea.  They have had no real frost on them to look beautiful but will have to wait a little longer before the are cut back.

The pots outside the kitchen REALLY ought to be done but have now been put back till the New Year - lazy old s*d can't be bothered. 

Gales come and go and one is coming, called Eva, and the windmill has gone. This is not a little Eva but a good sized one and the air is full of locomotion.

(Ha! Ha!) When it stops raining I shall go into the garden in search of its vanes. The pond liner is up again - a quick run down in the rain, a twiddle of the alkathene piping and water running out again. It is definitely coming in around the inflow pipe but under the liner. Time to dig out the pipe and scrap it, fill in the settling pond except for the stream at the back.

And then there is the question of burglary at this time of year. R and I caught this suspicious fellow trying to climb in (or out) of a window near Cartmel.

So my blog reader, perhaps both of you, may I wish you a hot, dry, prosperous New Year when you have recovered from the madness that is the commercial winter festival. Once it was a pagan celebration, then the Christians adopted it, now it is the property, by and large, of capitalism and the big buck (or over here pound).

And I leave you with a panorama shot on the shortest day from our kitchen door looking over Morecambe Bay not long after dawn.