45.

January 15th.

The wood, the wild place, der wald. It can only truly be viewed from a clearing, a glade where the light streams. This day the snow lies in heavy silence and even the depths of the forest are backlit by reflected sunlight. A red squirrel scoots along a diagonal, from one tree to another and vibrates a fringe of snow which drops then in a long, tremulous shower. The ditch is frozen in splinters, the moss banks, sheltered from the snowfall show intricate patterns and webs of multiple hues of green. The wood holds its breath while I stand as a living mark amongst wraiths of past lives imprinted in the undergrowth and in the tree barks, in this forest that has been worked, cut and replanted over the last 3 centuries.

England seems a far memory already. It was odd to return to the house here, see it for what it is, constructed out of an earlier workshop or barn. Its 18C origins jolted me into a scurrying fervour of small renovations until the snow fell in soft, flat flakes for 2 days and to resist the call of the outside would have been a wasted chance. The house could wait: as it often has.

I watch two starlings take the hoar frost from the undersides of twigs, as drink, as I return along the lane. Sylvie is cracking the ice at the base of her downpipe drain, outside her house. Bonne annees have been exchanged days ago and the new year creeps on fast. Soon the village will remember the dead from the concentration camps once again, while in Gaza the rubble of an ill balanced conflict memorialises the future.