OkESWICK: If there must be one dose of influenza in a winter maybe now shouldn’t be a foul time to get it over. There’s storm and turmoil outdoors, the drought has gone, and chilly handfuls of rain are being flung towards the home windows by a wind which is shredding the gold leaves from the birches into the wild air. There are, nonetheless, breaks within the storm after which the sky opens into far and distant mines of empty, rain-washed blue with feathery, nearer ribs of cloud and – over the fells and the valley rising cloudheads of white and gray. It’s actually, after all, the kind of day to be out, not in, however even right here it’s not boring. The climate has disturbed the birds – seagulls, rooks, and mallard stream down over this roof, darkish and light-weight collectively, till the seagulls flash, white out over the lake. Big flocks of fieldfares come over from the east and a solitary one has paused to quarrel over fallen apples with the blackbirds within the backyard. Within the brief, clear spells chaffinches, redpolls, and a treecreeper go out and in of the birch branches. Neither is that each one there may be to see.
A fats spider has its net outdoors my window, sheltered underneath the eaves, and on this wild day it has been deceived repeatedly as a wind-driven birch scale has tapped on its web-thread and introduced the spider scuttling out for nonexistent prey. It’s astonishing in all this wind and rain to see flowers – late crocuses, cyclamen, and nerines – stand as much as all of it however, little question, they too have craved for rain for a very long time now.
