The whole day.....

 I have mentioned many times on here that my sitting room window faces more or less due South.   It is now - at the turn of the year - that I notice it most.   It is a big window and at the Solstice - the Winter one - I more or less get the dawn, the whole day and the sunset before my eyes,   Now that I am more or less chair-bound I find this very fascinating.   The whole day spreads itself out before my eyes and I notice it - no two dawns are alike;   sometimes the sky is suggesting dawn at seven with a red streak here and there (and an early string of rooks going over.  ) Another day, like today, it is still almost dark at eight o'clock and you know the sky is cloudy and even the rooks are tardy.

It is now 10.15 and I suspect it is going to be one of those days when it doesn't ever really get light and there is no sign of any weather out there which beckons 'come outside'.

So I get out my new Ronald Blythe (which in fact is just a compilation of the best snippets from all his other articles in the Church Times over the years when he wrote a weekly column for them).  I have all his books but it is no hardship to have them  again in one book.February - 'Entrepreneur' - this is where  I have got to in my reading and this has me getting my book on Constable off the shelf and also getting my Road Atlas open at page 18.   He talks of Theme Parks and of John Constable and of 'them' trying to get permission to turn Mistley and the Stour Estuary into a Spa in the 18th century.  It  didn't happen in spite of Robert Adam designing a church there.

I find Mistley on  the road map and read his lovely picture of  'scores of swans grooming themselves' on the banks of the Stour and old ladies 'wrapped up like Innuits' because the wind 'blew in from the Arctic'.   He then talks of going on to Harwich to see Captain Jones house (he who captained the Mayflower)and him walking on to Dovercourt and here I stopped my reading because it reminded me that my first husband's mother came from Dovercourt so that gave me plenty to do today because I haven't thought of that side of my son's family history for a long time so I shall ring him shortly and ask how we have got on with that.

And that is how Ronald Blythe's enquiring mind gets me working.  I am in no way at all religious but can skip the religious bits if necessary but what I would give to have been born with the kind of mind Blythe has - leaving school at fourteen and now - now still learning and fascinated by everything.

Off to make the hot choc.   See you tomorrow.