venta

I was up in Burton-on-Trent at the weekend with Boojum. We did all the usual eating, drinking, making merry, and even some dancing. On Sunday afternoon, we all headed for home again.

Sue was giving me a lift back to Oxford. Just as we rounded the Cape of Birmingham and headed down onto the M40, one of the lit motorway signs read "fog".

Weird, I thought, it's completely clear.

Then, all of a sudden, there was fog. Just a straight line drawn across the road, sunshine on one side, thick fog on the other. We felt the temperature fall, even inside the car. I can only assume that God was having a day of rest (it being Sunday) and had handed doing the weather over to The Lad. I mean, it was quite good weather, but the boundaries could have done with a little work to make them properly convincing.

However, the low temperature meant that the fog was freezing onto everything, and slowly the trees became more and more thickly coated with rime. Within a few miles the scenery (or at least what you could see of it) had turned into a full-on winter wonderland. Each leaf, each blade of grass, was frosted and white.

Fortunately, Sue is as easily interested in such things as I am, and we pulled off into Warwick services to take photos. Although it wasn't quite as spectacular as the roadside had been, it was still impressive. Sadly, I had no camera with me - the snaps below were taken with my phone and are hardly the stuff of epic photo-journalism. I hope that Sue's photos (taken with a proper camera) will show how utterly splendid everything looked - a good coat of frost and even cobwebs, keck and chicken wire look beautiful.

After splodging around in wet undergrowth taking photos - and marvelling at everyone else's ability to ignore the wonderful ice traceries we were chasing - we trudged wet-footed back to the car. Service stations, bizarrely, aren't designed for pedestrians and getting to the sliproad on foot is a surprisingly long way.

About five minutes south of Warwick we passed another line drawn across the road, and all was brilliant blue sky and sunshine again.

So... this terrible, cold winter we're due ? I'm looking forward to it.

Just before posting this I flicked through my friends page and found it full of the news of Tal's sudden death. Tal's not someone I knew, just someone I've chatted to in the pub on a number of occasions; he seemed like a lovely bloke. He'll leave a very tall hole in the Whitby scenery.