Meagre, disappointing snow

I opened the blinds on Sunday morning expecting a garden covered with purest white snow - instead, all there was on the ground was the thinnest coating of soggy flakes. And so I headed for Chynów, hoping that the +1C in Jeziorki would somehow turn into a -1C in Jakubowizna, which received a more generous overnight snowfall. It did not. Thirty kilometres south, the weather was the same as it was in Warsaw; bleak, thin, damp snow. On arrival at the działka the kitchen thermometer read 5.5C, the one in the front room read 6.0C. Time to heat the place up, wheel out the motorbikes and turn the engines over, wheel them back in and go for a walk.

Below: the path to Adamów Rososki.

Below: the path to Jakubowizna.

Left: apples left to freeze, an unharvested orchard, Jakubowizna. Elsewhere, orchards have been pruned, or cut down and the land ploughed up awaiting new saplings. An apple tree is optimised for eight or nine seasons, then the trees need replacing. Although it was a good year for apples, the pandemic kept many pickers away. 

Back home for a sauna - an excellent investment in the house in Jeziorki when it was being built was a small room with a fitted Swedish Tylo dry sauna. Just the thing to warm up bones and get the sweat pores open. Two or three times a week from late October through to early April.

The tenth day of 2021, and other than a few hours of wan sunshine breaking through thin clouds on the afternoon of Tuesday 5 January, it had been uniformly dismal. A week and one day to go until Blue Monday - the so-called 'most depressing day of the year'. Spring seemed an eternity away but winter won't properly come either. Pumping out the exercises gets the endorphins flowing around the body, a short-term pick-me-up; a quick burst of 30 press-ups or 10 pull-ups

I opened the blinds yesterday to see dazzling sunshine! All day long the sky was blue - sadly work required me at my home-office desk, numerous calls (mostly Brexit related from bewildered exporters); apart from a short stroll down to Lidl for seniors' hours shopping, I hadn't the time for a daylight stroll to make the most of the sunshine. An evening walk under the stars, the ponds freezing over, had a positive effect; though the sun had gone down, the frosty evening lifted my spirits

This morning, though there's thin cloud, for the first time this year I felt a sense of the hope that spring is imminent, maybe a dozen or so weeks away, but it will come. I had a strong flashback to the early months of 1977, as a student living in Coventry, taking a bus to the edge of town and walking a disused railway line - that same sense of a spring coiled, primed, ready to emerge, powerful - bringing with it new energy and hope.

Covid is a downer, but compared to the darkness and gloom of a miserable sunless, snowless day in winter, the threatening pandemic is in the background, something to guard against. But overcast skies, drizzle, and damp cold (as opposed to a crisp frost) I find hard to deal with. Snow promised overnight with a light frost, so tomorrow should be nice...

Bring me sunshine.

This time last year:
The Inequality Paradox - a summing up

This time two years ago:
Familiarity, tradition and identity

This time three years ago:
Black hat merry-go-round 
(I've found four so far this season)

This time four years ago:
Skarzysko-Kamienna and Starachowice, by train

This time five years ago:
The world mourns the loss of David Bowie

This time seven years ago:
Where's the snow?

This time nine years ago:
Two drink-free days a week, British MPs urge

This time ten years ago:
Depopulating Polish cities?

This time 11 years ago:
Powiśle on a winter's morning

This time 12 years ago:
Sunny, snowy Jeziorki