Frozen

As I write that title, I have the sudden mental image of Anna, the granddaughter who featured in yesterday's blip, aged perhaps five (when was Frozen the rage?) acting out Let it Go, dramatically casting off a sock from her hand in lieu of a glove; now I'll probably have an earworm all night. The forecast tells us that shortly it will be absurdly mild, that night will hardly vary from daytime temperatures - but right now it is so cold that we think it's upsetting the fan on our gas boiler (it won't go off) and because the heating has gone off for the night I'm feeling chilly indoors as well as frozen outside (just a peek as I locked the door). 

This morning just ... passed. So we missed getting out before the snow started, and all I actually accomplished was to start work on this week's poetry for the workshop. But after lunch we scraped ourselves together to get out for a walk in what was turning into a fine-flaked blizzard. The far side of Loch Eck was sheltered from the wind, so that's where we went and that's where I took this photo. 

The canoes are lined up in the foreground like dead whales; if things manage to be more normal by the summer term they will be used by children on outdoor adventures with school groups, but for now they sit there, covered in snow, tied down. Behind them, a little bay in the loch shore is frozen at its rim. All along the track, the burns that I often video for their noise and their energy as they roar down the hillside have been silenced, locked into peacefulness as the icicles grow more and more grotesque. Some sheep, which we saw being delivered yesterday in the back of a lorry, stood looking reproachfully at us as if to ask what fresh hell they'd been landed in - though that could have been my mind speaking. We walked 6 miles and felt legless by the time we stopped, having met one family and seen another as we started to walk. 

On the vaccination front, I can report that I've not needed any paracetomol so far today, but shall probably take a couple now. MY arm is really rather sore now, and lifting anything with it is pretty painful. I also have a sore tongue - is that a symptom, or have I chomped it? We're both definitely feeling better, though odd things pop us to remind us. I was fascinated to read in today's Times (no, I don't buy it) that doctors in France and Italy don't think they should be ordering the Oxford vaccine because they suffered such bad side effects. Very odd reaction.