We’ve been threatened, we’ve been warned, and finally, we got the snow we deserve. My friends up north have my permission to laugh, take the mick and share photos of REAL snow… but down here in the soft South of England, we’ll take an inch of snow and play in it till it’s muddy slush.
I took the chance to stay indoors writing. A friend passed on some magazine calls for short stories with prompts that were so odd that I think none of my writing friends will be sending in submissions. No idea what an American magazine will make of our local version of Bigfoot, but I will be sending in the story and hoping they find it odd enough to publish. I’m now fired up with another idea for a weird story and will be spending time tonight and tomorrow writing it out.
Having got a story written out, I was up for a walk in the snow. Down to our local open space for a walk (yes, it is allowed under our local restrictions; even so, I tend to go there only when I am fairly sure there will be few or no other people there). If you’d told me two years ago that I would be avoiding contact with other people to this extent, I would not have believed you. It was a reassurance today to see that there were no footprints in the snow on the way to the wood.
Snow still coming down while I stood in the field and looked across to the woods. There was snow on the aconites, on the snowdrops, on the beech leaves, snow still coming down, blowing off the roof of the cabin. There’s a periwinkle flower covered in snow, I kid you not. Flowers are incredible.
I went home smiling, woken up and cheered up by my walk, and joined my husband and our two surviving cats in the warm house. Tomorrow I will write out my second idea and make sure I have the right format for the first before submitting it to the magazine. If they don’t like it… I have plenty of places to send the story of the Crazy Cat Lady.
Julia Chalkley 