snow had fallen (a very tiny amount)

I wound the bathroom blind up this morning to find a very light dusting of snow on the lawn, and settled on the leaves of the Magnolia grandiflora.  After sorting out the cats' breakfast and the chickens' morning treat of porridge oats and sultanas, and defrosting their water, I refilled the bird table.  The little crowd of tits, robins and finches was back within seconds, too cold and too hungry for the luxury of flitting around playing at being frightened by me.

A mixed flock of pheasants and pigeons was under the young oak, eating more of last autumn's bumper crop of acorns.  There were still quite a few left, when I raked up a few more oak leaves not so very long ago, but they won't last long at this rate.  I don't especially welcome pheasants into the garden, since they eat fritillaries and other flowers, but I don't grudge them acorns in this weather.  The nuts make a mess of the grass anyway, or sprout like weeds when the squirrels and jays cache them in the borders, so I'm really quite grateful for something to get on and eat them.  Just as long as the pheasants don't all come back for pudding in the fritillary season.

In the front garden the blackbirds have moved in en masse on the three trees of Malus 'Red Sentinel'.  They always leave these until late in the winter, and as the fruit are capable of hanging on the tree for a very long time if nothing takes them, the display of small, bright red apples lasted right through January.  I don't know if the birds find the fruit unpalatable, only to be eaten after finishing everything nicer, or if they find the slender branches, bowed down under the weight of fruit, uncomfortable to perch on.  Whatever the reason, the 'Red Sentinel' season is always late, but has finally been declared open.  I like the blackbirds, except when they eat the soft fruit or peck holes in the eating apples before they're ready to pick.  I enjoy their full-throated song, and the chuck of their alarm calls.  The cocks are handsome birds, plump, black and sleek, yellow of eye and of bill.  The hens are softer-looking creatures.  I don't begrudge them the crab apples.

It wasn't a day for working outside.  The Systems Administrator announced that as it was the weekend it was time to light the fire 'up the top', so that we could have our Saturday night dinner at the dining table instead of on our laps in the study or in the kitchen.  The SA gets cabin fever if confined to the study for too long, and regards eating the evening meal in the kitchen as a social failure in a way that I can't fathom.  Having grown up with an Aga I've always liked kitchens, anthracite fumes and all.  But it is sensible to get some warmth back into the fabric of that end of the house from time to time.  By this morning the temperature in the sitting room had fallen to 11 degrees C.  After putting the radiator on mid morning, and burning a fire all day (with coal as well as logs), it took until half past four in the afternoon for the first ball in the galilean thermometer on the mantelpiece to drop.  This thermometer is remarkably accurate, judged against the weather station indoor sensor, and the lowest ball is calibrated at 18 degrees C.  The temperature outside didn't rise above freezing all day, and I think remained at minus one or minus two, and I never switched off the greenhouse heater at all.

One of the friends I saw yesterday has simply retreated with her husband and dog to one room for the duration.  They live in a larger and colder house than this one, and with the price of coal what it is aren't able or willing to keep a fire going in two rooms all day.  Some do-gooding organisation suggested a couple of months back that people like us should be encouraged to move into smaller homes that we could afford to heat, freeing up our surplus space for families.  Apart from the fact that we like our existing homes, and the peace, and the privacy, and our gardens, and having enough shelf space for our books, that is a really helpful suggestion and I've never have thought of it by myself.  Wow.  Thanks loads.  Actually, other friends who live in better insulated, or smaller, or less open plan houses, or just spend three times as much as we do on heating, are sometimes worried by the idea that in winter you simply retreat from a chunk of your house.  It's fine.  Compared to all the people who can't afford to heat even the one room, or who live in flats so shoddy and badly built that they can never be made properly warm or dry, we have absolutely nothing to grumble about at all.  It is a peculiarly English thing, a certain kind of middle class bohemiamism, to deliberately make oneself so elaborately uncomfortable.  You can tell we are the sort of people who went for a week's canal holiday in a boat heated only by a coal burning stove, in October.

The cold weather and charging about doing things have made my chest worse again, and although I am very sorry that one of the friends we were due to see tonight is ill himself, it is probably just as well that we don't have to clamber into the car at about the point the snow is due to arrive and go out to supper.  April might be the cruellest month, but Eliot hadn't tried living in a 60s built timber framed house in north Essex in February.  Maybe if he had he'd have considered it a luxury, making it to the point where the dead land started breeding any lilacs.

cold winds

The wind had a chill edge today.  The chickens gave up mid morning, and just went and sat in their house instead of their usual corner of the run.  I feel sorry for them.  It isn't very interesting being a chicken in bleak December, but there isn't much I can do about it.

I set out to make a homemade lard cake for the birds, done by melting a block of lard in the simmer oven, then pouring porridge oats into it until all the lard is soaked up.  Unfortunately the first time I checked the lard it hadn't finished melting, and then I forgot all about it, and the Systems Administrator shoved the soup for lunch into the oven without looking, and molten lard slopped over the edge of the basin and on to the oven shelf, transferred itself to the bottom of the soup saucepan and so the oven hob, and dripped to the base of the cool oven.  It turns out that the simmer oven shelf can be removed for cleaning.  I've managed to get by without knowing that for the past five years, not being especially keen on oven cleaning and not having spilt lard on it before.

The SA filled up the peanut feeder for the first time this winter, and within a very short space of time there were fifteen tits on it and clustering around it.  Even the long tailed tits came, and we haven't seen them near the bird table before all season.  It was amazing how quickly word got around that there was something good to eat in that red wire cage, and that it was safe to go in.  How do they know?  Especially the ones that hatched this year and may never have seen peanuts before.  Though birds can be cleverer than we expect.  I heard on Radio 4 that members of the crow family that hide food when other birds are observing them will return later and move their stash to a new hiding place, but don't bother if they don't think they were seen hiding the food the first time.  That puts their theory of mind ahead of the human nine and ten year old autistic children I heard about on Radio 4 this morning.

The heating oil arrived, and we now have a full tank, having been down to the last bar on the electronic gauge.  The SA ordered the delivery more than a week ago, and we were starting to get slightly twitchy.  The central heating hasn't been turned on yet, but we might now venture to run the radiator in the bedroom.  Probably just that one for now, and maybe the small one in the sitting room whose valve has broken, if the SA can't work out how to turn it off.  The Aga heats the kitchen and the study is heated by a log burner.  Indeed, so deeply ingrained is the habit of never running the radiator in the study that it has a bookshelf in front of it with the TV on top.  The oil delivery was 1925 litres and will last us a year or slightly longer.  I am dismayed that we use such a lot, but the SA tells me that compared to friends also living in detached country houses our consumption is about 40% of the norm.  We have put insulation into the loft space we have, all 15cm of it, and installed double glazing, and a super efficient condensing boiler, and there isn't anything else cost-effective we can do, short of deciding that cold showers are really bracing and healthy and improve your immune system.  The best thing to do with this house when we trundle off to the retirement home would be to demolish it and start again.  It is just a gigantic shed.  There are no cavities to insulate.

Addendum  One of the cats has been being sick.  I had to clear up a mess from the stairs this morning, and the SA had to clear up in the hall over the weekend.  This evening, just as I was browsing through the Guardian arts pages on-line, I heard cat sick noises from the hall, and found the grey tabby throwing up on the hall chair.  She managed to puke into my wellington boots which had been left (bad move) in front of the chair.  Sometimes my Franciscan love of animals almost deserts me.