Dawn Light

A sudden flip from icy mist and threatening clouds to blue skies and blinding sun. A flip as a fillip. I spent some time collecting hopeful images, no mid-winter blues for me: the first sign of snowdrops; honeyed stone walls in low, winter light with the moon in a blue, noon sky; a black-eye robin; apple-bark at sunset as abstract art; icicles on a steaming boiler; a gold sunset through winter-skeleton trees

This image was also intended as spirit-lifting. Sparkling frost on my prized lime-washed wall in the first dawn light - welcoming back the sun as the Druids used to do. Well, perhaps I'm not as solstice-proof as I'm trying to be. I look at this and Leonard Cohen's bleak words come to me:

A million candles burning
For the help that never came

I think the Greek chorus in the background of our lives is harder to endure in winter: four drown in freezing, dark sea while Westminster bickers about trafficers' business models; the macabre, pantomime dystopia of American politics; the normalisation of war in Europe; a laundry-list of forgotten conflicts and disasters; the drift towards totalitarianism; the ever-present ghoul of climate breakdown.

I heard a smug journalist interviewing an intensive-care nurse who had stood on a strike picket throughout this freezing day - asking her to justify the nurses' demands, when they are already better paid than retail workers. And she was so nice! I wanted to hear profanity and fury, but of course her patient, empathetic answers carried so much more power. Some good people bring help where they can