A couple of days ago our barometer reached 1040 millibars, as high as I ever remember seeing it. Another 25 millibars and it would have gone off the scale. High pressure gives us settled weather, in this case cold days and even colder nights, so the inch of snow we had late on Boxing Day has lingered.
This morning ground frost on a section of pavement that I’d cleared resembled a thin coating of snow.
Before the frost we harvested the last of the Howgate Wonder cookers and used them in apple bakewell tarts and a mini apple pie.
On Christmas Eve, a coffee stop at Create cafe in the Wakefield One building gave me a brief pause to sketch the skyline to the southwest towards the Emley Moor transmitter.
Squabbling Squirrels
But we did manage one trip further afield before Christmas. On the 17th we made a delivery to our book suppliers before Christmas, zipping down the motorway to Orgreave but coming back via the Peak District.
At the Riverlife cafe at Bamford in the High Peak, siskin and nuthatch were among the birds coming to the feeders with a couple of squirrels fighting it out for control of the squirrel feeder below. While their fight escalated into a chase, a third squirrel sneaked in and fed in peace. C’est la guerre!
There’s more fighting over food as we walk along the lane at Castleton. Two sheep are head-butting each other over the last scraps left in the feed bucket.
A neighbour’s cat watches intently through the hawthorn hedge from its vantage point on next door’s concrete coal bunker.
The fan palms weren’t looking bedraggled after recent heavy frosts. It wasn’t a promising morning for the crazy golf at Pirate Island, Outlet Village, Castleford, where these temperate climate palms have been planted. The attendants were checking out the course, using one of the log raft bridges across the water hazard to break the ice.
After two or three hours in Middle Earth watching the last instalment of The Hobbit, I did a quick sketch of these owls on display by the climbing wall at Xscape. £3 to hold a bird of prey, £2 for a reptiles.
These leeks gave us our lunch – two bowls of leek and potato soup – with a bit left over for tomorrow lunch and we stashed four bags of chopped leeks in the freezer, enough for another twelve portions.
We’re helping out with a short spell of visiting and I could spend a couple of hours reading or writing or drawing from a photograph but I’d rather not cut myself off entirely from what is going on around me so I do what I usually do; start drawing whatever I can find of interest around me.
