As Meat Loaf had it, we gotta make most of this night
SUNNY and cold, morning frosts and vast open skies of unerring blue, the weather has been wonderful in recent days. Even better have been the crisp winter nights.
I’ve enjoyed being out in the open every evening, even if only to walk to the bottom of our garden to collect the food after the chicken have put themselves to bed. Well, I say birds, but, after a spate of deaths from old age, we have a single lonesome hen clucking to herself down there.
Do not pity her, though, she seems happy enough and when we tried to introduce potential companions in the past they were savagely attacked.
Anyway, I digress, but then it is easy for the mind to wander off at night with the frost sharpening blades of grass and the stars glittering above and one’s imagination racing away. It is strangely unsettling to be in such a familiar space as our small suburban garden when it is rendered unknowable by darkness.
If I’m early enough a lone robin might be tweeting its scratchy song. The later I leave it, the more likely I am to hear tawny owls.
We don’t get enough of these cold winter evenings these days, so to have a run of them is a joy indeed. Though it will cloud over somewhat in the coming days, there remains the “risk of ” (as the Met Office terms it) or as I prefer the “opportunity for” further frosty evenings ahead.
Because overall frosts are becoming rarer and the dark nights of winter more damp and dreary. Tonight when I am in the garden under the pale shadow of the moon I shall think of the singer Meat Loaf, who died on Thursday, and vow to relish every one of these evenings.
As he sang in a ‘Bat out of Hell’:
‘So we gotta make the most of our one night together/
When it’s over, you know/
We’ll both be so alone.’*