STILL GARDENING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

The week begins with sleet and rain showers slicing through a cold damp air. Midweek it goes even colder but sunny. Big dawn skies are back.

Winter is definitely here now and as the urgency to get out there battles with the desire to sit by the fire and be warm motivation is hard. So I take old images and mess about Photoshop to produce a graphic image like this.

I am reading Bob Harris's autobiography Still Whispering After All These Years and wonder where I was when it was all happening. (Actually for some of it I was slogging through 105 hour weeks in hospitals or four and a half days on call as a family doctor (not all the time)). Mind you I would not have wanted a broken bottle in my face at a Sex Pistols Gig.

So to gardening - after all this is supposed to be a gardening blog - sort of. You can see the house from the road through the big Sycamore now all the leaves have gone.
 

The banking below the house is scruffy and needs work. The gardener is also scruffy and needs work - 'Do your stretches,' the doc says, and, 'Lose some weight,' so onto a diet which means I could have twelve and a half whiskies a day as long as I consume nothing else but water. (Not in the whisky). 

Christmas approaches and I am filled with humbug, well Everton mints actually, well, I was until I started the diet. R is cooking up something with millet. Perhaps I should change my name to Ebenezer - what the Dickens made me think of that? 
The other house in the garden is still intact despite the weather though a little ropey.

There is still colour of sorts about. In the bark of trees like the cherry and the beech leaves which will stay on until spring. They provide a good wind break against the winter storms - the next one is called Caroline and we might have snow by the weekend (but probably just more rain.)

Even forgetting colour, there is something special about the textures in the garden in winter, frost on the leaves in the woodland.

Time to go and light the woodburner and warm my toes by its flickering light and ponder on the shambles that is called Brexit, and the shambles across the Atlantic called Trump - actually I will not bother - I might just have one of those whiskies.