Sky watching

When you are a glorified taxi service the horror of early morning overtime by your partner is only deadened by the fact that you are half asleep when the reality of having to move about comes home to you. The darkness of night convinces you that you should be tucked up snugly in bed and not stumbling ineptly towards the finicky business of contact lens insertion. Multi tasking shaving and brushing your teeth is not a convincingly combined activity when sharp and fully awake; it is merely a recipe for disaster when still emotionally in the Land of Nod.

There are few advantages in being up and doing before you have to be. There is the malicious pleasure in returning from taxi duty and swiftly passing all the stolid commuters resignedly crawling their way to work. There is the realisation that your tareas can be completed almost before the day has started.

But the real pleasure of early morning driving at this time of the year is the sky. Whatever develops during the rest of the day, it is often the case that early morning is one of the best parts of the day when you consider the weather. We have seen some wonderful skies on the early morning run.

This morning the sky was absurdly spectacular. The cloud was relatively low and the rising sun bathed the bottom of the clouds with bright orange, tinged with liquid gold with a few burning rays escaping though the clouds into the darker reaches of the higher sky. The picture was so beautiful that it almost became kitsch: a painting of what I looked at would have been dismissed as unimaginative and chocolate box Romantic. It was the subject matter of technically inept amateurs, but it was actually real and in front of me as I drove.

As I was driving someone to his work rather than going to work myself, I was able to indulge my aesthetic sense, but I wonder how many others were lost in the deadening effect of their immanent work rather than able to appreciate the wonders all around them?

Believe you me, the splendour of the skies didn’t last long. By the time the bread had been bought from Tesco’s on the return trip, the clouds had closed in and the dull skies of a Welsh February had re-established themselves with the courtesy detail of a wet windscreen from a sharp shower!

The one thing that being brought up in a damp island does for you is to encourage the ability to find positive in depressing negativity. The dark, grey wet days of winter do many things: depress the population; nip flowers with frost; confuse vegetation by not being consistent; rot wood; create puddles in irritating places and deny us the sun.

On the positive side the cold kills certain suspended vegetation that lurks in my pond. The water, magically, clears and loses its deep green tinge, or rather colouration and clears, revealing that, once again, the fish have survived.

Having a pond with fish in it is a constant source of worry. During what I refer to as The Verdant Months when the water of the pond is an opaque viridian, the complete lack of visible finny activity convinces me that the entire fish population of the pond is dead and rotting on the floor of the pond, each cadaver gradually filling with light organic gas prior to the entire tribe’s zombie-like resurrection as they float shimmering with putrescence to the surface – dead torpedoes of guilty accusation leaving a vivid message of neglect for the RSPCA.

It never happens! The clear water shows that The Verdant Months have hidden all sorts of knots and genderings of the finny folk and lo and behold! multitudes of small fish have appeared as if by magic! The large orange goldfish not only have survived but also have thriven and grown more stately.

It’s amazing!

As I type this Barca has just been defeated by Liverpool in the Champions League. I have never seen Barca play so badly (and over the past few years, I really have seen Barca play on a number of occasions) and give such a poor account as a team. There seemed to be no cohesion, no understanding of team mates positioning on the field, no finish.

I am still astonished that I feel so involved in a game of football; Toni has a lot to answer for!

Roll on the next round in Anfield!