footprints

Yesterday was crisp and white and beautiful. Walking back home at noon there was still frost on the ground. I took my book vouchers into the Cambridge University Press shop and Heffers and bought three beautiful hardback editions: the massive, glossy, colour-printed Odysseus Unbound by Robert Bittlestone, a gorgeous three-part boxed edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, complete with ribbon. I was also looking for Once More, With Footnotes by Pratchett and an edition of Culpeper's Complete Herbal, but neither was forthcoming; the former is only available in America so I shall investigate Amazon, and the latter is probably best found second hand.

Walking back across Jesus Green and the common everything was extraordinarily still. No sound but the frost-edged leaves crunching under my boots, the wind barely stirring the trees. Tang of woodsmoke on the air. The quiet was something essential, inherent in the perfect white blankness of the sky, the breath misting in front of me. It felt as if nothing could have broken it. Walking by the river I indulged my normal nosy fascination with the canal boats, noticing as much about them as I can, the traces of people who live in them, the pot plants and bikes perched on the roofs, the books and herbs crowding on windowsills. It's always a lifestyle I find myself envying in an abstract way - in fact one of them is for sale at the moment, and I let myself dream for a few minutes about buying it and painting it up, and having a life on the river with guitars and books and crocheted blankets and no internet. I was wearing the purple gloves dennyd gave me, and I had bags with beautiful new books in, and (at least until I got home and had to confront my procrastination) I was happy.