Winter

Even though this is Scotland, our particular bit doesn't usually get snow until February and March. It's the first week in January and the temperature hasn't reached more than 0 degrees since Christmas. Salt cannot be found in any shop so our vegetables are healthy and taste as they should. Dan has just come in from saving our neighbours from nasty slips. As a substitute, he quite cleverly decided to pour cat litter over the pavements around our building. He surely is a local hero especially since we'd just come back from the doctor's as Dan has a sneezy cold and a throat infection. He can't speak so we are communicating through Yahoo Messenger. The little house across the road - a white building which in its shape and simplicity looks like a child's drawing -now resembles an iced Christmas gingerbread cake. The cat leaps out the kitchen window, sits on the outer sill considering his next step, then disappears into the frozen garden. He reappears with a yowl only an hour later then retreats back to the sofa, his coat wet and cold. The rear windscreen wiper of the car hangs limply as snow, deceptively frozen, proved too hard, and someone has scrawled in big chunky letters, visible to passing aircraft, LOL on the two inches of snow on the car's rooftop. A lottery ticket scratchcard is embedded in several days' layers of ice outside our living room window while the radiators chug constantly, a reminder of the scary heating bill we'll get in February.