Tonight.

Brilliant walk: clear, crisp, still and frosty. No cartoon crescent moon dangling on strings above the horizon tonight. Tonight’s gibbous was high, white and bright, holding splendid court with a retinue of splendid stars.

I had a thought. Light is indestructible energy, right? So I thought that if I shone the torch at a star, the individual particles would disperse until they were invisible to the eye, and eventually to even the most sensitive of instruments. But a tiny fragment would eventually arrive at the star, wouldn’t it? Unless the star moves, of course; didn’t think of that at the time. I did it anyway. You never know who might see it in a few hundred years time.

And I heard a noise that sounded like the cackle of a pheasant, but I didn’t think it at all likely, not four hours after the fall of darkness. That’s tonight’s little mystery.

Forgot the ladder again, but I did cough loudly when I was passing Sarah’s house. I swear it was accidental; I really did just happen to catch something in my throat at an inopportune moment. No shutters got hurriedly thrown open; no feeble, feminine strains of ‘Jeffrey, Jeffrey, wherefore art thou Jeffrey?’ followed my lonely trek along Mill Lane. Just the cackle of a pheasant, or whatever it was. (My experience of Sarah disposes me to doubt that she is in any way given to cackling, so no reasonable hope resides there, I'm afraid.)

Best of all, I lit my first coal fire of the winter tonight. A coal fire in the living room is one of the rare compensations on offer at this time of year. I’ve ordered my reading matter to go with it for the first few weeks: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. I expect I’ll be quoting from it ad nauseum.