Winter Trees

 
Thankfully, I wake feeling much better having recovered from yesterday’s icy beach walk; thanks so much both for your kind words and for your generous response to yesterday’s blip. 

Poor Daniel and Solveig have had to say goodbye to their little cat Elvis.  He’s been with them for over twelve years having been taken in as a near-feral stray when they lived in London then moving with them to Liverpool and then to Meols. He even spent a few weeks here when they were waiting for their first house to become vacant. A sweet little black and white cat, his health has been declining for some time but they’ve cared for him so well. 

Solveig is on her final week before maternity leave, but Daniel works from home and, bless him, he’s struggling to deal with an Elvis-free house. We offer to meet up in Burton Mere so that’s where we are today - though we spend more time talking in the new cafe than walking round the reserve which is icy and almost completely bird-free, only a few mallard braving the cold. 

So photographs are limited to the slender skeletons of winter trees around the ponds, reflected in the partly frozen icy waters. I’m reminded of the opening of one of my favourite Sylvia Plath poems - Winter Trees: 

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing -