The Year's First Snow

I spent most of Thursday lunchtime sitting on this veranda in the sun, watching bumblebees visit the verbena, which is still in boisterous flower, and enjoying a leisurely lunch - not expecting the extent to which the temperature would plummet over the weekend, and the northwesterly wind which would bring us the first light snowshowers of the coming winter.

Snow is very pretty when it first falls, particularly when the sun shines low across it, but struggling into several layers of clothing to walk down to the village shops brings home the realities of winter life, not least the need to....

....wear our boots into which we've screwed metal studs to give us some grip on icy pavements.

I've always maintained that humankind was never designed for life in high latitudes, that we are a savanna animal which used beaches to expand around the Earth, and that we should have confined that expansion to the warm places, like this gentle beach in Tanzania.

There's so much in this picture which I love. The man riding his bicycle along the bottom of the beach where the sand is hard. The ngalowa fishing boats anchored just offshore. The fisherfolk's houses nestling in the shadowed shade of coconut palm and casuarina. The high tide lines along the beach which I once walked each morning to see what had been washed ashore overnight. The blue skies and - though you can't see them - the light breeze and balmy temperatures.

I'd love to go back, if only for one more time.