Sheep Shots

Happy, belated, 2010!

The brain-fog of the holiday is just starting to clear, as are the Christmas decorations (it's OK, they were all down by twelfth night) and at least seven opened boxes of chocolates are languishing loveless about the house, having had all their good ones eaten with no one around to tackle the orange and strawberry cremes, montelimars or pralines.

The holiday was good, hotel luxurious, food overly plentiful and Mum was in very good spirits. The only things I read were her books - she has that common 83-year-old thing of liking extremely gory police or pathologist procedurals, so I raced through one about Kunal Trows (mass murder in The Shetlands, vaguely folklore-related) and one on The Rosary Killer of Philadelphia. The weather did not beat us on either the journey down or the journey back (though that was a close-run thing - our flight to Glasgow was cancelled but we were shuffled onto the Edinburgh plane, to land in rather severe conditions where it took them longer to get the stairs that you must descend to leave the plane than the flight itself). But husband and dog were there to greet us.

And on arriving home, after basking in centrally-heated luxury for a week, I could not help but notice one thing. The cold. There was no thaw in our absence, and some more snow on top. Currently we are having rather beautiful, sunny days where the temperature does not appear to get above -10 and you could quite easily Torville and Dean it on every pavement and side-road. Plus I'm wearing a hat in the house.

So here's some scenery and sheep.

On the Western Ideal of Beauty

Sheep are woolly for a reason.
This ice-bright season.
I, meanwhile, bitterly regret
shaving armpits and shins
and plucking my brows,
suspecting each single
extraneous hair
would be useful, very useful
right now.