Transformations

[Calendar note - this refers to Saturday 23rd December]
Travelling in to London on the train yesterday, I noticed that there were patches of foggy countryside where the trackside trees were all liberally sprinkled with a Christmassy frosting of - well, of frost. These trees looked clean and crusty white - like the thick white icing on a home-made Christmas cake against the duller grey and off-white of the surrounding fog and mist, and where the sun broke through (only very occasionally) they were lit up bright and dazzling.

Our village has - like most of the rest of the country - been covered by near-freezing fog for days: a heavy, dull blanket that's been damp and unremitting, making moisture that's dripped off the trees and reducing the daylight to dusk-like levels throughout the day. Today, when I went out on my bike for the first time in ages, the fog ceiling had lifted a little, and you could see the roofs of houses and trees in their entirety. It was still chilly and damp.

Cycling up the long slope to Eydon, mist still clung to the top-most branches of the tall trees and, as I climbed, I saw that the trees up here were showing the same whitened effect as the ones I'd seen from the train. All of the lane-side hedges and bushes Strangely, though, the whiteness seemed to fade away as I got level with each tree. I slowed down a bit and tried to look a bit more closely, but the residual ground-level mist was collecting in tiny drops on my glasses, so I stopped to wipe them dry, pulling up at the side of the lane and putting my foot up on the verge while I fished my hankie out of my jogging trousers' pocket. Thus unencumbered of obfuscating moisture, I could see that the 'white' frosting was actually clear ice: each branch, twig, berry and dead leaf had, courtesy of the fog's condensed moisture, collected an extra layer on its windward side/underside - a partial sheath of ice that refracted the flat winter light so that the ice looked like a white covering; the closer you got, the more easily you could see that this uniform whiteness was composed of frozen rivulets of ice and, increasingly, of individual droplets as the daytime temperature rose and the ice began to melt.

As I cycled further around the route, the drip, drip, drip of falling water increased in intensity as the ice melted, sometimes quickening to a rain shower-like sound under the bigger trees. This drip and fall of water was interspersed with sudden scratchy flurries of melted ice tinkling onto the road surface as - seemingly - some kind of critical mass is reached and large quantities of ice crystals melt and fall in slithering sequence. My bike's tyres scrunch over the ice.