Stinking cold

I've been battling a cold all week, and it finally won on Friday. Unfortunately I was in the office on Friday - an office where the temparature fluctuated all day between lukewarm and bloody freezing as the heating came on and went off, came on and went off. The new office is lovely, but does leave a bit to be desired on the facilities front. Hopefully these are just teething problems.

So, after a thoroughly miserable day, I was never so glad to be home and warm. I spent all of yesterday in bed. What luxury. Eddie walked the dogs, fed the animals, and even did the weekly trip to Sainsbury's (and managed to forget only 2 items). He brought me soup, Lemsips and cups of tea. I finally got up about 7 pm and had pizza and watched telly for a couple of hours before going back to bed.

I haven't knitted all week - a true sign that I have been dangerously ill.

I feel much better today, though am still coughing my guts up.

You'd have thought the recent cold snap would have killed all the germs lurking about. We have so far escaped the snow, but we have had some fantastic winter weather recently - hard overnight frosts, and brilliant sunny days. I took these pictures last Sunday morning when we walked the dogs:














This was the view in the Oak Tree field. Yet, surprisingly, just a few hundred yards further on, where the edge of the field meets the woodland...














This part of the land is in a dip, and it's obviously a lot more sheltered in the woods.

The view across the river:














I love this winter weather, and relish it even more after spending 7 years in Cornwall where, although a beautiful place to live, the winters were unrelentingly wet and miserable. I always spent the winter feeling utterly depressed, and with a generally wet spring as well, it seemed to drag on forever. Back in the south east I love the colder, dryer winters, which seem so much shorter. Dry weather makes the farming much easier too. Wet = mud, and even though the goats are inside in the winter, when it's wet the damp seems to seep into the barns. I think they prefer the dryer weather too.