Eight hours

... of daylight in every twenty four at this time of year. Just knowing that makes it easier to deal with, husbanding each precious minute jealously, not being caught unawares by the encroaching dusk. It makes you think, what jobs need to be done in daylight, and which can be left until after dark. It makes you realise that you shouldn't try to achieve as much in a short winter's day as you might in a long summer's one.

Now, at least, the days are getting longer, minute by minute, day by day, although the most miserable doldrums of the winter are yet to come, unrelieved by the fiery festivities of November and December. It's a long, miserable slog to March now; things improving, but imperceptibly. T.S. Eliot thought that April, with its promise of new life and hope, was the cruellest month, but I love its promise of warmth and light; the first gentle touch of the warm sun on my back. Summer, Braunston, seems so far away at this time of year, the past a barely remembered dream; the future something we dare not imagine. Yet we know that it will come; not what form it will take, or what we will be doing; not even, these days, what the weather will be like. But as long as the earth keeps turning, and stays in its orbit, the days will get longer, and summer will come again.