Too Tired to Blog! Curling up with a book.

It can be bleak here in winter.

 After the frenetic travelling, trains, hotels and social events of the last week it was a bit depressing to arrive at a cold, empty house in the dark on a damp, cold evening, with snow on the ground.  Three months mail had accumulated on the dining table (thanks to a kind friend who sweeps it up every week) and there was milk in the fridge from the same kind friend. But it was all a bit of an anti-climax and it felt very lonely.  I whacked the central heating boiler up to maximum and went to bed with TWO hot water bottles!

I’ve spent the last couple of days catching up with the post and sorting out the house.  It’s very odd coming into a place you haven’t been in for such a long time - it seems to belong to a stranger and you notice things differently.  I found myself looking round the accumulated junk of a life-time and thinking ‘Do I really need all this?’  So a bit of de-cluttering is on the to-do list.  I'd intended to do some gardening, but that's out of the question.  The ground is either water-logged or frozen solid depending on the time of day and it's too cold to do any pruning or planting. Spring still hasn't arrived here.

This isn't normal weather for mid-March. There’s more snow on the way apparently - lots of it - and Siberian winds, so I’d better get the thermal gear out of the cupboard and onto the radiators in preparation.  There’s hot chocolate on the shelf in the kitchen and plenty of new reading matter to curl up with  - Sarah Salway’s new poetry collection ‘You do not need another self-help book’ - just in time for World Poetry Day -  was waiting in the pile of mail on the table, plus a book of short stories by contemporary Irish writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir, called ‘To the World of Men, Welcome’,  as well as  ‘In Their Own Words’ a book of poets on poetry edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes.  Good stuff on the Kindle too - Rachel Abbott’s new thriller The Back Road (read on the train),  Kathleen Jamie’s fabulous collection of essays  ‘Sightlines’ and ‘Orkney’ - the new novel by Amy Sackville that I’ve been waiting two years for.  British winter weather is perfect for reading!