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.
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