It’s too dangerous, he wrote on the weather report note that he leaves for me each morning, c/o John Kettley. I went out anyway. And it was. I got soaked. I tell him at breakfast that the storm scares me. Why do you go out in it then? he asks. I don’t know, I say. I think it’s because if I face it I may diminish it’s power over me. I walked into the village and caught the smell of pine needles. That helped. There was a large snowman light in someone’s garden and I noticed that it had been tethered to a fence. Was this in expectation of the storm? He looked so cheerful in that bleak light.
