Right, that's Christmas over for another year and we are already into a new decade.  As you get older it seems to me that you only have to blink and you miss a year.  Childhood memories seem to be composed of interminable summers and long days spent in stuffy classrooms distracted from the wit of Shakespear or the nuances of Keats by the sound of leather on willow filtering through a dusty windows and counterpointing the drone of Mrs Ralph as she tried to instil in yet another gang of spotty adolescent boys the merits and joys of English literature.  We won't even mention Charlie Tofts whose approach to teaching maths was similar to the English abroad and to shout ever louder if you didn't get the point of compound fractions or calculus the first time round.  I never did and I share with Paul Merton the fine distinction of failing CSE maths which Paul asserts leaves us both less mathmatically literate than a monkey.  Old Charlie would often end a maths lesson a quivering, spittal drenched wreck looking like the aftermath of an audition for Nosferatu.

This past couple of weeks has seen us with the most snow I can recall here at Horton in the past 11 years.  In fact I was talking to a local farmer up by the Tarn on Thursday and he reckoned that this was the most prolonged spell of wintry weather in the past 20 years.  The Tarn is frozen solid and the swans have removed to the slightly warmer environs of Turn Dub which remains unfrozen as the water is warmed (relatively) by its journey underground from Ingleborough.  There are a number of hare tracks in the snow near the Tarn, but so far no evidence of the fox that left tracks here last winter.  The Lodge has really benefited from the insulation that we installed at the start of the year and it feels remarkably warm inside despite the sub zero temperatures just a few inches the other side of the wood work. If there were any waterfowl on the Tarn it would be a very comfortable place to sit and watch them.

The birds are flocking to the bird tables and feeders in the garden.  They seem to have set meal times with an early morning feed (breakfast?) followed by a mid morning snack and a much longer blow out at around 2pm.  I know when the raisin supply has run out as a large female blackbird bounces up and down on the roof of the bird table clucking, scolding and flapping her wings.  A re stocking of raisins restores calm.

I have seen very little sign of life in the river, but it's really been too difficult to get down to the bankside anywhere but at New Inn.  Our wild brownies will be well on with spawning now and I am very hopeful that this cold calm weather will encourage a bumper year for young trout.  There have been no damaging spates and provided we get a steady thaw the trout redds should remain undisturbed when winter loosens its grip.  In the meantime the conditions here are pretty well deal for spawning although how any creature can contemplate sex when it's this damn cold beats me.

Ian