England under frost

Yesterday morning I returned from the West Midlands by car.  The north Worcestershire countryside was beautiful, whitened with frost.  We travelled mainly on the motorway network, which has a tendency to leave the traveler slightly dislocated; all of a sudden we were in the East Midlands.  At Broughton and Geddington we had entered an almost magical landscape - sometime intimate, other times vast - where everything seemed in a harmony: blue skies, touches still of frost, beautiful stone built villages, the brown of fields and the more striking green of evergreens in that long slanting light of winter.  Few exceptions to this - the mammoth cement works at Ketton, for instance.  Eventually to Stamford, and the slow, gentle diminution of hills to the Fens.

James Lees Milne

   Firstly let me apologize for not blogging of late.  I was preparing a post on F L Griggs when my father was taken ill and was hospitalised for over a week.  Then came Christmas and the preparations thereof.  Not too mention the continuing upheaval here with re-decorating.  My neat plans were thrown into terrible, and sometime apathetic, confusion.  Normal service will, I hope, be restored shortly.

   I suppose it was reading 'Anti-ugly', but for the last couple of weeks I have been dipping into Michael Bloch's biography of James Less Milne, and the volume of Less Milne's diaries entitled 'Through Wood and Dale; Diaries 1975-1978'.  Lees Milne is a character I find deeply fascinating, not only (and I hope this doesn't sound too prurient) on account of his personal life but his interest in architecture and history, and his self-knowledge.  It was through both books that I returned to church on Christmas morning.  I think I would have liked to have met him.

   After re-reading both 'Excellent Women' and 'Casino Royale' I am re-reading the first part of 'The Lord of the Rings'.  An excellent book for this time of year.