nIcE,bRiGhT,wAsTeD tImE

Nice, bright, wasted time. The frozen wastes shine in the floating January sun. Everything stuck together by the rare pure ice of 2012. A tiny glacier eats up gardens, hedges and fences, make sculptures from cardboard and twigs, pebbles and tyre tracks, piled up and collapsing in icy avalanches, refusing to move. Cars and doors are stiff, the early morning resistance of white windows and fused locks, ice to the fingertips and words stuck to solid breath. Traffic warnings and winter terms are scattered across the airwaves. Jack-knives, collisions, black ice and skid risks. Every part of life becomes more risky and over reported. Coffee seems hotter, more welcome, less boring, steamy.

Cats refuse to move, hide in blankets and dodge the still, chill drafts. Reluctantly ,moving slowly and deliberately under protest and under our feet, as if their fur coats had stopped working. We don't stop working, we journey out, tense in the shock of the low temperature, hurrying to get back indoors or basking as the car heater finally yields some of it's precious heat. I make a pot of hot chilli, let it steam and challenge the season, hold it in a bowl and breath it in, drive away the evil spirit, kill the imagined germs. The Winter spirit that ranges across the land, for the time being, like a cold steel guitar, a long note blows over Central Scotland, the peculiar Celtic blues play and sing out across the silver landscapes. Nice, bright, loud, wasted time.