Can I take your postcode, please…?

Exactly ten thousand days ago today, driving home on a gently warm afternoon in the middle of September 1996, I was on the receiving end of the first of three serious road traffic collisions (RTCs) that wrote-off the succession of vehicles I was driving and increasingly damaged my neck: leading, ten years later – despite hundreds of physiotherapy sessions, and many, various minor operations – to major, and extended, surgery: when my cervical spine was stabilized from the front with four surprisingly lengthy screws and a sizable titanium plate. (My neck was so badly deformed – like the poor cars before it – that a bespoke mechanical replacement for one of my cervical disks had to be forgone; and the two vertebrae surrounding it were instead fused together.) I have not seen my shoulders since.

Unless a man starts afresh about things…

Loweswater at dawn, frozen in time

My first walk of the new year: and to a location now – as it will be forever – so very near to the centre of my heart and melded so very closely with my mind. Yet, on Saturday, it was clothed so tightly in frost, and held so singularly still, that its icebound enchantment freshly conjured even more enthralling memories to be layered, interlaced, with those soothing ones already possessed. Not just visual – such as the moon-glinted mint-white of the fields below fells of dry-cured bacon; and audible – the rushing becks, the joyful birds; but also, of course, sensual – the ice tightening my face like Botox; the frozen, sogged soil crunching beneath my boots, spongily, surprisingly, bearing my weight… – along with the absolute astonishing absence of Aeolus or his team of Anemoi: their breaths apparently held abnormally tightly, or at least currently (although Eurus would soon awaken: his lazy easterly breeze drawing disappointing clouds to mask the valley from the sun – whose rise I had come to witness, of course… – as well as stinging my eyes on my return…). The place looked and felt new-made: its birth accompanied by nature’s gently twinkling fanfarades!