(Our frailty)
Thick fog. I can remember proper pea-soupers. That’s what they (whoever they are) used to call them. Days when you could barely see across the road.
The vain and inadequate fashionable clothes of youth. Chilled to the bone. You thought you’d never thaw.
Frightening nose-to-tail jams on motorways. News reports of pile-ups and death.
These days what I’d call a thick fog is a rare event. Less pollution perhaps? Or climate change? I don’t know why. But now a foggy day now feels like a treat. And it is a treat. And it was. Despite.
I’ve always enjoyed the change fog heralds, the change it imposes on us. I enjoy it physically – being out it, how it looks, how it feels. And I enjoy it – although perhaps appreciate it is more accurate – for its unstoppable force and the overarching reality it reminds us of: our frailty.
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The photos, the words: they’re just attempts to capture the day and the thoughts and emotions it invokes.
Honest Solitude
Crouching fog, quietly reaching out.
Gently, relentlessly enveloping.
Shrouding, calming.
A lonely sopping cold. Near-deserted paths.
Everyone, everything, hunched, withdrawn.
But it’s a splendid isolation.
A smothering escape.
A relaxed, honest solitude.
With implacable trees knowingly looming, regardless.
(Click on an image to launch the full-size gallery. You can use your keyboard’s left/right arrows to navigate if that helps.)
Arguably
Whatever the weather and however we are experiencing it – from inside or not – it can remind us of our frailty.
But that aside, more often than not being out ‘in the weather’, being aware of and ‘in nature’, is restorative.
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