winter days

Summer's lease hath all too short a date, wrote Shakespeare.  The Bard was right, but Winter's lease seems even shorter when you are trying to get stuff done outside.  Look at yesterday, when it rained and I didn't get anything done.  Today looked ominously damp when I peered out of the bathroom window, but by the time I'd eaten my breakfast it had stopped raining, the sun had come out and it felt as though the worse of the gunk stuffing up my sinuses might have drained from my face.  I wrapped up warm and went out into the garden.

It was cold.  Not frozen, sunny, but cold.  I was wearing a thermal polo neck base layer left over from my sailing days, two long sleeved tee shirts, a cotton smock, a fleece jacket, a fleece scarf, a fleece hat, gloves, thermal long johns and trousers so crusted with mud that it must constitute an extra insulating layer in its own right, and I noticed that it was cold.  Partly because each time I breathed inside my scarf my glasses steamed up.

I opened the greenhouse and the conservatory, noted with pleasure a new flower bud forming on my Plant Heritage plant stall Clivia, watered in the conservatory, picked up some dead leaves off the floor, and planted out the last four pots of instant daffodils.  Then there was just time to listen to last Friday's film review podcast while weeding before being only slightly late to lunch.  I needed a full hour by the Aga and two mugs of tea to warm up, then didn't even manage two more hours outside weeding the long bed before it began to hail, and I decided that enough was enough.

So that's February's lease, light at eight and too cold to venture out before nine, dark by half past five but virtually freezing by four, giving seven hours of usable daylight of which you lose over an hour warming up between the morning and afternoon shifts.  As for rough winds shaking the darling buds of May, Shakespeare can take it from me that the rough winds shaking the tightly clenched buds of February are considerably worse.