electric trees

Stark and grey

capillary systems poke into

the pewter smudged sky

I did not think I would...

but I miss the snow...  and the extra light it splashed around, brightness where the dulled earth squats now.

Hoek

Here at the edge, waiting for the ship, looking out across the baleful night.  The lights of the industrial complex on the other side are white and orange, but only the orange ones are picked up by the overcast sky, glowering intensely.  And the water, half river, half sea, the water performs a strange trick with the light, it steals and swallows all the bright yellow tones of the sky, and reflects back a blood orange red.

The water moves constantly, rolling and roiling, a twitching throat, and the red painted barriers in front of me are contrasted sharply against the white snow covered quay, it is not an auspicious start to a journey.  The wind whips up the petrochemical flare and the whole sky flickers.  I shiver, and hope that the homecoming will be warmer than this.

winter tyres

snow fields exhale fog
higher than zero, new tyres
swish wet black tarmac

2x Glühwein recipes

Recipe n° 1:
Place 1l red wine, 0.5l orange juice, 0.25l rum or cointreau into the slow cooker.  Add 75g demerara sugar and stir until dissolved.  Add cinnamon stick and grated nutmeg.  Stick 12 cloves into a small orange and add.  Turn slow cooker to auto and heat for approximately 2 hours, allowing the flavours to infuse.  Serve in heat proof glasses or beakers.


Recipe n° 2:
Place person into shower, shampoo and condition hair, wash body, drying time approximately 30 minutes (to include cleaning of ears, rubbing and combing hair, inserting contact lenses, moisturising dry skin on legs, looking in the mirror and wondering.)  Dither for 90 minutes, including drinking coffee, playing at the computer, wondering what clothes to put on.  Dress person (5 minutes after dithering is complete).  Chefs note:  extra dithering for outer layers of clothing may be required.  Add purse, gloves, scarf and leave house for Weihnachtsmarkt and walk to nearest Glühwein vendor (approximately 4 minutes.)  Serve in convivial surroundings.

Crowd surfing

He had to put his gloves back on after paying for the punch, to insulate his fingers from the cold and flake filled air as much as the hot earthenware beaker, releasing its clouds of alcoholic steam into his face. 

It felt strange, he was here again this year not so much with the expectation of seeing her, not after his unsuccessful efforts to find her again the previous year, but so that he could say to himself that he had at least tried. 

It wasn't that he had been unable to get her out of his head, only that she, and that swirling topsy-turvy night kept popping into it at irregular intervals, mainly when he was slouched at his desk feeling dully frustrated with the way things were going. 

He hadn't realised the girl was one of the players, which was odd, he should have seen her the following evenings when he looked, he would surely have seen her if she had been on the stage? 

Wandering aimlessly through the market, the heated bodies of the crowd warming him just as much as the drink, he found himself back down at the side of the stage by the transformed fountain, its bowl now full of burning logs, spitting out sparks and the wonderful woodsmoke smell. 

She wasn't on stage now, it was the kid juggler and another man, clad in red and black motley, tossing firebrands at each other; he watched her absence resignedly thinking his mind was playing tricks on him but as he turned to return the beaker to the bar, she appeared from a lifted flap at the side of the stage and their gazes snagged.

Weihnachtsmarkt

Snow falls onto the fires from the carbon paper sky, and dusk slithers down behind it to cloak the night market. 

He lifts the scarf away from his face for a moment to breathe in the redolant smells, roasting meat and onions, the exotic spice smell of the Arabian cooking tent, and a heavy dull wax smell in the back of the nostrils from the candle lanterns sputtering overhead. 

There is a new juggler this year, just a skinny kid with blond lank hair and a face turned inward as he concentrates on tossing the white balls around; from here it looks as though he is juggling snowballs.

The band behind him consists of two drummers, one of whom is beating a rhythmn on the stretched tight hide, and a three strong wind section, two youths and a girl in her mid twenties, who also plays a flute, the notes skipping around as the balls rise and fall. 

The girl, it is her, the red haired vixen from last year that he has not managed to shake from his mind. 

Her hands dance on the instrument as he pulls the scarf back across his face, and moves away to the Glühwein tent to wonder he will do now that he has seen her again.


(last year)

intemperate

I love the cool feel of this New Orleans doorstep, captured on a day where the temperature and humidity were high enough (and the exercise of ambling around strenuous enough) to send rivulets of sweat down my back and into my waistband.
A handful of weeks later, back at home, today the temperature is not forecast to go above freezing point, suitable for wrapping up in scarf and gloves and visiting the first day of the Weihnachtsmarkt and the first Glühwein of the year.  Outside the leaves are limp, those on the bushes with cold, and those on the ground sodden with yesterdays snow.  My Aran jumper, knitted twenty years before as a student in Bradford, is fished out of the cupboard in honour of the start of Winter with a capital 'W'.
The underfloor heating, turned up in my bathroom, bathes my toes after the shower.  Like walking on a beach under the evening sun.  But it is not so easy to imagine myself there, I cup my hands around the coffee and wait for the sun to come up.

anticipation

my toes are cold, the frigid air

steals in from the opened door.

the bells from the monastery

chime above the town,

notes snowflaking through the brittle air.

A brief life...

It was cold when I was born, high up in the supersaturated clouds, a fleck of dust as my heart. As I coalesced into being I drew molecules towards myself, pulling them in, holding and moulding them and building out from my core. I built with symmetry, keeping my essence close to me, embellishing with feathered branches as I came to my full size.

I became aware of others around me, most of whom had a broadly similar shape to my own. We were kin, clan, our hexagonal centres fringed with delicate structures at each apex, with our markings, our scintillant prisms arranged to each individuals taste.

After the building, the socialising; we swirled around each other, dancing, drifting through the clouds, adding complexity, final touches to ourselves as we pirouetted together. Such a brief time, but glorious, before the air shifted and we were cruelly jostled, flung about and out, and my downwards journey began.

Oh, that dizzying fall!

At first I panicked, tumbled over and around my six-fold axes, and then as the others were flurrying alongside me, this gave way to excitement at the speed, the beauty of us. The vectors of my progress, swooping paths through the layered atmosphere, were beautifully described arcs. Caught up in my own adventure I failed to notice that the others were on subtly different paths until it was too late, they were already too distant.

But I was not alone, there were new companions plunging downwards with me. They were strange, smooth and shaped like needles with none of the branching embellishments that marked my kin. To me they seemed brutal and machinistic, they had made their shape solely for the purpose of darting below as fast as they could. Their birth could not have been the delicious dance we had, but a sullen extrusion. They would not have whirled with each other to celebrate their glowing, growing grace.

I wished I had not ended here with them, all too soon the air ran out and our fall was halted by an impenetrable vast blankness, our surfaces gripped it as there was nowhere else to move too. I was stationary, such a dreadful state to contemplate that I had never done so. How could it be that I could no longer fly, what was I now that I was no longer a creature of the air and its currents?

The sharp needled clansmen with me were similarly horrified, we huddled together at the end. Huddling closer and closer as the molecules of air were squeezed away from us, we lost our boundaries and our structure and melded to each other, no longer individuals but amorphous and indistinct. From the dust at the heart of all of us, we were now a fresh dusting of snow on the ground.

Looking out

Looking out as she drank her coffee the sun splashed against the windows of a house across the corner, spilled yellow through the floor to ceiling patio windows in her flat. She loved the windows, although they would have been more of a joy to her had they not had to be fully shrouded in muslin for privacy. If they had been overlooking a rocky seashore with white spume and roiling waves.

She lived on the ground floor of a new apartment block right in the town centre; people and cars trickled past at most hours of the day; shoppers with baskets in their grips for daily groceries from the market, workers in the offices of the next block and visitors to the bar underneath the offices. At weekends tourists ambled past, having seen the Abbey and the market square, come to gaze on the remaining segment of the old city wall opposite her living room.

She twitched the curtain to see outside, to drink up the brightness after a flurry of cloudy days, yesterdays snow still white on the paths and branches and on the leaves droopy with cold; the snow was crisped up with the overnight frost.

Watching the people out and about their daily lives. The smart looking woman, maybe the same age as her, swinging black coat but treading carefully with stiletto heels biting into the icy snow to stop her slipping at each step. The thin chinless man, a scarf wrapped across his mouth to keep in the precious warm and wet breath, a small protection from sucking cold into his lungs. He was walking with a small dog that had a bobbly red blanket jacket (gilet?) as well as it's own fleecy coat.

She thought, although it was not a new one, a habitual sneer about the stupid animal, being tethered to go for walks, she thought about how stupid the man was to own a tiny dog like that, it seemed an admission that his life was small and conventional and rulebound. She thought that the dogs paws must surely be the coldest part, why not little boots?

She was surprised to lock gazes with the man as he glanced up, surprised that he did not immediately look away, scurry away with the dog.

Afterwards he wondered often what colour her eyes were, his brain had not grasped or processed that information as he looked at the woman in her short nightdress, her hair dishevelled and as ginger as the cat that twined through her ankles, its tail tickling her pale knee.

The muslin veil of curtain dropped in front of her and her pale bare legs, shrouded the sunshine as she blinked his gaze out of her eyes.

Winter evening

Today, leaving her apartment she noticed that winter had advanced several steps since yesterday.  The pond was only discernable from the hummocky outline of the snow covered stones around it's perimeter; the day before it had reminded her of cheap winter camouflage, gelid pale grey, darker grey where the water was deepest and patches, drifts of snow on top of the ice. 
The air was less chilled though, it was poised, waiting to release the next snowfall.
At the Christmas market she indulged in people watching while waiting for her friend, parents enjoying the gluhwein, a cigarette, a chat with an occasionally seen friend or neighbour.  Toddlers chubby with winter clothing; a larval stage between child and sleeping bag; ran and slid around in the snow, climbing onto their little sleds and falling off the other side again, laughing as they came into contact with the powdery snow.
As the warm wine glowed through her insides to heat her skin, the sky let go of its burden of snowflakes, dotting peoples clothes and heads.

Go with the flow

During the day, his phone had buzzed, people had come to his desk or caught his arm in passing and murmured "So sorry," or similar as they cancelled coming to the arranged get-together for that evening; the least believable a text saying "Had a prior appointment". 
"Yeah, that you somehow managed to arrange since last week when you said you were free," he sneered to himself.
So that evening, he went out in the frosting dark by himself, no-one to meet, simply to see what might happen on an evening alone in familiar surroundings made unfamiliar by the visitors to the town; both the revellers there for the night only, and those of the travelling fair, there for the duration of the festivities.
The braziers burnt, as did the cookfires for the roasting meats and the bakers ovens; rich wholesome smells wafted, released into the night air; and alongside that the smell of spirits and wine seemed less potent and so he drank more; the liquids both warming and disorientating.
Not that that could excuse what followed, when standing by the spitting coals he'd caught the eye of a woman with twisting red hair, her form shrouded by what looked like a grey hooded cloak; he'd smiled at her and somehow she'd smiled back; somehow they'd separated from the crowd and he'd taken her to a quieter spot under the trees; pressed her against him...
Cold now, when he awoke, or at least when his brain foggily started thinking again, there was no-one to be seen; and his clothes were in disarray; but checking his pockets he realised that each of them had conned the other, his wallet containing a few notes and coins was missing, but in his fist he grasped her purse.