not so black as it's painted

The world seems astonishingly wet.  The near side of my car is covered in dark splashes of mud from wheel arch to rear passenger window, which I picked up at some point yesterday travelling to Great Bardfield.  I am not even sure when, though it was probably somewhere along the lane I took to cut back to my route after I missed a turning and found myself heading for Sudbury.  It morphed by degrees into a very small lane, complete with a ford which by yesterday was happily dry, since the depth gauge on the footbridge went up to six feet, and the road sign at its mouth saying Not Suitable for Heavy Goods Vehicles was true in a literal sense, but understated the case about as badly as Wainwright's description of the Wastwater Screes as being best not attempted in high heels.  Anyway, I must have clipped a ferociously muddy puddle at some point.

Weeding tufts of grass out of the gravel, where they have encroached over the edge, I found a hidden puddle, each tuft coming up dripping.  The sandy soil in the top part of the garden is workable after any amount of rain, but I wouldn't fancy my chances on the clay in the back.

The Systems Administrator ventured out briefly in search of something to clear congested sinuses, and took the pharmacist's advice to stick with a nasal spray rather than decongestant pills that might clear your facial passages, but knock you out in the process.  According to the pharmacist there is a lot of it about, and the strain of cold currently doing the rounds does have the nasty trick of reigniting with a fresh round of symptoms, just as the sufferer thought they were getting over it.

The evenings are getting longer, which is some compensation for the damp and disease.  I didn't finish picking leaves out from the hellebores in front of the oil tank until a quarter past four, and could still see perfectly well to put the dustbins out at gone half past.  I don't share the popular prejudice against January, as reported in the newspapers, that it is an awful month, with everybody feeling broke and flat after the jollities of Christmas, or an insane time to try and cut back on alcohol or lose weight, since January is so miserable that the only things to get you through it are booze and cake.  True, the SA has a very nasty cold, but between us we have also had particularly dire colds or flu that I can remember in April, June, August and October.

In the front garden, the winter flowering cherry must have taken my critical words to heart, and has produced a sudden flush of small, very pale pink blossoms, while the back garden is alive with birds flitting about.  The light yesterday was wonderful, and the countryside north of Chelmsford exquisitely pretty, while today was quite warm enough to work comfortably outside, and not windy at all.  True, January can be a difficult month when it snows, but so can the summer months when it rains endlessly.