I have just come in from the night but it wasn't dark. Here, on the edge of a northern city, street lamps outshine the moon on pavements packed hard with over three weeks of unmelted snow, tonight crunchy and everywhere peppered with the patterns of a thousand soles. A few years ago, in deep country, it was my pleasure to venture out in the moonlight to make tunnels for my cat through a thick blanket only occasionally crisscrossed by the pads of badger and fox.
Two of our older neighbours are still waiting to leave their front doors. I bring them milk and bread, brussels sprouts and papers and eggs and they tell me in low tones of all their friends and relatives who have somehow lost their lives in the past few months. I feel that in this long winter spell knowledge of their own frailty has crept very close.
Our granddaughters bounce in and then out again like two great puppies now, with flying hair and long shaggy-fringed coats. Their laughter fills the little garden as they leap on heaps of snow and slither along the paths. I hope the neighbours are smiling behind half-open blinds.
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