Midwinter spring

It's been quite a long time since I've posted anything, because we've had weeks of day-after-day dark grey, overcast and wet (but mild) weather. There were two days between Christmas and New Year when it was just a little brighter and I went outside to photograph the confusion that the weather has occasioned in the plant life.

When T S Eliot wrote (in 'Little Gidding', 1942)

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown

He had in mind

                                      Now the hedgerow

Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom

Of snow, a bloom more sudden

Than that of summer

He wasn't imagining that all this would be in flower in December:

Hazel catkins fully open

Spring flowering daffodil - not an early variety

Spring flowering forsythia

Spring flowering hellebore - not the 'Christmas Rose' variety

Spring flowering polyanthus

Alpine strawberry!

And when the weather is wet and miserable, what is more comforting than a home with a sleeping cat?