Monday 19 December 2022

No true beauty without decay

My walk into Chynów this morning was to capture the beauty of the landscape under a clear blue sky before the weather turns, and to buy a few items of food and kitchenware. Below: snowfield with hare tracks.


Below: shooter's shadow, looking up ulica Słoneczna. Soundtrack to today's walk: The Atomic Mr Basie (album recorded three weeks after I was born). 


Some mid-century U.S.A. scenery; a tanker passes Chynów along the old DK50, chrome gleaming in the sun, snow piled deep by the side of the road.


Below: Chynów's wooden church of the Holy Trinity dates back to the early 17th century, the wooden bell 'tower' (the smaller structure to the left) to 1867.


Below: I popped into the hardware store for a few items and got this snap of the cemetery wall across the street in the early afternoon sun. The old J&B Snack Bar (just to the left of here), serving my favourite burger in the whole of Grójec district, closed this summer and has now become a flower shop.


Left: the green runs. Back home, empty the rucksack, heat up some bigos kujawski for lunch (the sort of bigos made with red cabbage), get some work done, and soon - evening draws near. The shadows lengthen quickly, and the time comes for the sunset stroll.

Below: at the gate, ten minutes until the sun dips below the horizon in Chynów, seat of a third-order administrative division, according to timeanddate.com, which shows that today the evening is already one minute longer than when we had the earliest sunset a few days ago.


The sun has set at its most south-westerly (231°) point on the compass. During the summer solstice, it sets at 312°. A few minutes earlier, I was overflown by a pair of swans flying east, quite a sight.

Heading back home the second time today, having made the most of the sublime conditions. A thaw is coming from the west; by tomorrow morning the warm front will have brought freezing rain. Daytime temperatures for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday (Christmas Eve) and Sunday (Christmas Day) are forecast to be between +3C and +6C, accompanied by rain, rain, rain and more rain. Underwater by Boxing Day. Dismal. At least today had been seized. 13,000 paces.


To quote Withnail and I's Uncle Monty, there can be no true beauty without decay. Were every day as visually stunning as today, it would become monotonous. The drear prospect of slush, mud and filth made today all the more sublime.

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