Solstice snowdrops

After last night's party, I didn't sleep too well, overstimulated by socialising I guess. We live a quiet life for the most part these days. The doorbell rang just after half past seven this morning. It was a delivery man from Ashton's with the Christmas salmon Clare ordered. I was awake and ran downstairs to collect the fish as Clare wasn't quite awake yet. Then I went back to bed to listen to Thought for the Day and the news. By the time I eventually got up it was nearly nine and Clare had cooked Saturday pancakes for breakfast, and started making a fish soup for lunch. And thought she'd gone back to bed after putting the huge salmon fillets in the freezer for the weekend!

It rained until mid morning, then a strong cold wind sprung up and drove the rain clouds away. The internet was inaccessible and it took forty minutes of landline phone time to get it restored. The landline is being taken away, unless you pay £150 a year to retain the sevice. This will hit hardest those whose emergency devices only connect by hardwire. Scandalous. We don't need that and must switch to the all digital service to retain our landline. It doesn't bode well when the fibre lines are stil prone to outages. Changing our account to all digital costs nothing apart from another half hour on line via Direct Messaging, once the internet was restored.

At last I was able to make an effort to email digital greetings, over fifty of them, spanning decades of family life and ministry. It took a long time morning and afternoon to finish the job. The remains of the filleted salmon Clare transformed into a delicious fish soup with spuds and carrots for our lunch.

The chilling wind made walking the park on ordeal, but compensated by finding a few tiny snowdrops on the verge of the long avenue near the stables. There's a patch of ground where they first appear year after year. Finding them on winter solstice day is remarkable, about ten days earlier than last year. It was about the fifth of January the year before that. A symptom of climate driven change as the average temperature for this time of year creeps up incrementally.

I got home as the sun was setting and finished the Christmas emailing. After supper I watched the final two episodes of Crá, a complex 'whodunit' in a close knit rural community with shameful family  secrets and abusive relationships. Then made an effort to go to bed and catch up on sleep I lost last night.