Out of the freeze…

And back to endless rain and mud. (Unlike the travellers who have been basking in 30+ degrees and who have been messaging photos of themselves cooling off in various exotic locations!) Here there are huge piles of snow against some of the hedges at the sides of the roads and a few tracks still blocked but the temperature has now crept up considerably and run off is causing minor flooding problems.  The countryside looks tired and dirty littered with the piles of blackened or muddy snow. Some of my neighbours higher up the hill couldn’t get a vehicle out for over a week during the snow.  Thanks to a couple  of local farmers who scraped the lane of snow we were able to “escape” after only four days confinement! We haven’t had a winter like this for 35 years.  The year my son  was born.  A close friend who was also pregnant  at the time and in the early stages of labour had to have a lift on a tractor through the snow to a main road to get an ambulance to hospital as I remember..

In the last few weeks it has been very hard on the farmers a lot of whom have just started spring lambing.  There’s bound to be a lots of losses of stock.

Spending a fair bit of time in the house (when not shovelling snow!) I have done a quite a bit of painting.  Including a little sketch for a birthday card.