Presumably it is as cold in the town as in the country, but seeing all that cold glistening mud as I climb over the stile freezes me from the inside out, the opposite of a microwave.
The dog doesn't mind, tho I notice that if convenient she will trot round the wettest and darkest. When the sky is blue, so is the river, - usually everything is grey, the only grey it is a pleasure to see is the smoke from the chimneys.....and my new winter coat, tho probably that should have been black but you grab what you can find when shopping in a small town.
Small town shopping is not a joy and I have to drive for half and hour to even get there, and then pay car parking for the privilege.
My name is obviously not Joy.
So I don't go often, there is too much choice in life anyway, or not enough. There is a lot of what looks like choice but really there isn't anything that fulfills your desires, so you are left disgruntled and vaguely guilty for not having been satisfied.
Of course everything would be fine if we had a John Lewis' store, that is the dream; Debenham's doesn't really cut it. I doubt JL would either but it is the fantasy of every stout middle aged female for miles around.

The church is getting a new lady vicar, a foreigner too, that will put a pigeon amongst the cats. When I say the church I mean the one at the bottom of my garden, not the gloomy Baptist sepulchre to the right of the main road, nor the even gloomier Methodist home for Dracula to the left , depending on whether you are coming or going. My church is a concrete insult to worship that was piled up in the 1950s after the Germans carelessly fired one of their doodlebugs, missed the docks by some miles and demolished the old village church. The woman who lived in the shadow of the old Norman walls died too, there is a prefab there now.

Not that I go to church. I do look after a couple of abandoned graves that i pass on my shortcut back home, I suppose I am on disturbingly close terms with the local dead and decayed. Harry killed at 18 in the First World Tantrum, and the 2 babes drowned by their despairing father in the Depression that followed. His wife and remaining child were rescued before he could do more, presumably he was hanged, maybe he knew Harry.
It can get very depressing in this village, specially when it is raining and muddy
.

Day 2 tidied and jettisoned some books, so some literary connection, but not much. It's obviously all going on in my head, perhaps.

day one

this has been very difficult to achieve so I shall retire from the scene for a short time.