Wednesday 15 March 2023
I couldn’t stop taking photos and videos yesterday, we finally had some proper snow. I had been taking photos through the Velux window in my office, using a camera I hadn’t used for a while and trying to get used to it again. I noticed that the light was changing and that it was snowing a bit. Within twenty minutes of repeatedly taking photos, it was obvious that there was hardly any background left to focus on so I looked at the window behind me and realised just how much it was snowing. I’d been taking pictures and fiddling with my camera for almost thirty minutes, and in that time maybe two inches had fallen. And it kept on coming. Going by the roof of my car, I think we probably had five inches. It’s still around now, even on the trees, but there’s a bit of breeze and I keep seeing chunks flying off. It’s very pretty.
We are supposed to be driving to Lewisham on Saturday for a week. I hope the roads are fine for us to get there, even though we could postpone it by a few days. I’m looking forward to being in London for a week. As usual, I have probably planned far too much, seeing a few friends and my mum, but I also want and need to keep some momentum going with writing and photography. I also want to tidy and rearrange the flat. I still kind of wish I had gone down for a long weekend earlier this month with the sole purpose of making the flat look and feel less like a burglary crime scene.
Yesterday, I pretty much decided about painting the staircase balusters, handrail and newel posts. They’re going to be the colours of the bed frame, I definitely can’t justify more tins of paint, the cost or the storage they take up, and just for a small section of staircase. They are currently painted white and the coal days in particular added a certain, erm, shadowing, shall we say, to them. The white paint, under scrutiny, really does look like undercoat. The rest of the stairwell is very scuffed and marked and we will paint it one day but we’ll have to embrace the dado rail effect of two-tone, which I’m not at all averse to. If we tried to cover all the white and scuffed staircase walls, we’d have to call in help as the wall goes up into what would once have been attic space, and even Mitch isn’t tall enough to reach up there without some kind of temporary scaffolding or hanging-from-rafters equipment.
Our flat in a new-build block does not have such painting constraints, the ceilings are significantly lower and there are no staircases.
I’m feeling a bit directionless today where writing this is concerned. I’m far too distracted by the snow globe effect outside. I’m so glad we’re here for this snow rather than in London, this is exactly the kind of weather I’d thought we’d get more of in winter. I hadn’t foreseen the amount of rain and ice we’ve endured instead.
