Snaps

It's finally cold, thank goodness; the frost has come. Tiny, furry needles. Town pigeons are puffed into cartoon pigeon shapes and walls steadily burn with ice. It's beautiful here. Guess who went out with their camera yesterday?

Here's my dear college, with its famous Barry Flanagan bronze horse: the one all the undergraduates want to sit on. Of course they can't. When I got my job here I'd hoped that I'd be allowed to sit on it. Fellows' Privilege, and all that. No dice.

College cloisters. Oh, the ghost stories I've heard about these. Nuns walking into walls, fellows following them and disappearing forever. That kind of thing.

The view from my college staircase. I'm rather annoyed that one pretty, frosty day turned me into the very model of a lame amateur photographer who feels compelled to do arty shots. Like this. Groan. (Yes, it's broken. But only a bit).

And then I did a bad thing. I bunked off work and drove to Wicken Fen and gloried in the frost. By the time I arrived, the sun had started melting the thick frost on the poplars, and my entire walk was accompanied by the noise of frostfall on frozen ground. The shards were the size and shape of fingernail parings. White shadows under each tree like heaps of fingernail parings. Very strange. End of the world stuff...

Phragmites reeds. Clouds of fieldfares. Cold fingers. Iced water.