Autumn into Winter

Miraculously beautiful morning today. Set off in the dark in the slightly fogged-up car after scraping ice from the windscreen and side windows: the ice is always crustier on the west-facing windows, for some reason - more ridges, requiring more elbow grease. Once the light started fading up above the motorway, it turned into a chillily beautiful, Hardyesque pastoral scene: a great arc of peach-coloured pre-dawn sky grading into grey-blue overhead; sheep on deeply-frosted fields; hilltop trees black against the glow, and, once there was enough light to free them from their silhouettes, all the trees and hills and distances blended and softened by frosty haze; mist curling like smoke off half-glimpsed watercourses next to the motorway where the bush-cover broke and a culvert passed under the roadway; and then the enormous orange-gold disc of the sun, sudden as you crested the ridge, unlookable at; in the rear-view mirror, the squinting face of the driver in the van behind, his cabin all lit up and unnatural-looking with golden light.

Nice.