Red sky in the morning…

…Shepherd’s warning. Everyone knows that. This morning’s sky was the exact shade of a collared dove’s breast; iridescent pearly grey with an underlying sheen of lilac. I wonder what that means?

I often wish I’d had the chance to spend more time with an old neighbour of my parents – he had been a meteorologist and would stand in the pub car park at the bottom of the lane gazing into the sky on dry evenings. If you stopped to talk, he’d tell you what the cloud formations were called, why they’d formed, what it meant for our weather the following day and what it could mean for the weather in Norway, or Russia, or for fishermen in the Atlantic.

All I could really tell about this morning’s weather was that it was cold enough to seriously inconvenience a brass monkey; frost on every single leaf of the box hedge at the end of the road, little piles of ice shavings scraped from windscreens dotting along the pavement making it look like there had been a flurry of tiny, very localised snowstorms, and small people on their way to nursery looking like varicoloured perambulatory starfish in their quilted snowsuits and bright woollen hats.

Must remember to top the bird feeder up with suet pellets tonight. The sparrow mafia are not impressed by pleadings about a busy schedule and queue up on the front windowsill to glare meaningfully at us if we let the flow of calorie-boosting titbits dwindle.