The Frost Report

Here is the frost report: it’s frosty.  I cycled to my counselling session this morning with the air biting my fingers and chewing my ears.  It was cold then and it’s cold now: one of those days when the sun doesn’t make it through the clouds.  The kitchen is down to 12 degrees and I will have to put the heating on soon or it’ll never get up to temperature.  Still I guess, what with global warming and stuff, it’s good to know it can still freeze.

So: at the moment I am focussing on short stories.  I’ve got one almost ready to go off, called ‘The Dot Com Revolution’.  It’s about an older woman’s struggles with the modern world and specifically technology: she keeps the TV and computer well away from each other in case they fight, and always switches them off when she goes out.  She has a friend who keeps trying to get her to go on Facebook and eventually she gives it a try.  Then there’s another story about my teaching days and a third story is about people being like sticks of rock, but that’s not so well worked-out.

At the moment I am shivering in the front room with the gas fire on and trying to warm up.  You’d think I’d be used to it, what with growing up in freezing vicarages with ice on the inside of the windows, but somehow it never gets any easier.  I am aware that I find dry cold better than damp cold even if the temperature is lower, because the damp seems to seep into the bones, but I’ve never been very good at dealing with cold weather.  My friend at school used to call me a frowsty, which was possibly a word she’d made up.  When I think about it though our uniforms were totally inadequate for the winter months: a skirt and blouse with a thin v-neck jumper, a raincoat (my mother bought a lining for mine) and a regulation scarf (I had a long brown maxi-scarf which kept getting me into trouble.)  And tights!  Hideous, futile garment!  They ought to be banned.

That’s it for now.  Back to the pen-drive.

Kirk otu