Winter Landscape Notes - Dusk

Evening light from the house last night, 5th December; the light very different tonight, simultaneously harder and softer, more colourfeul and more harsh. And it should be colder tonight.

Smoke rising vertically and then falling apart softly; the horizon ringed with a peach/apricot light, whites and peaches; the sky overhead a steel blue, a diamond blue; the words for gems and fruit describing cold and distance. Leaves on the grass patterned with frost all day. Bare black branches absolutely motionless against the sky, every detail silhouetted, almost expectant. The cluck-cluck-cluck of pheasants, their racketty, whirring flight; a good day to see pheasants. The last of the gunfire down the valley, the lines of shooters/hunters/gunmen(!) in browns and tweeds walking slowly across the Moor; sometimes the guns are the familiar crump-crump, sometimes a bigger sound, like a brick dropped onto corrugated iron. The peach-light intensifies as the light leaves the valley and the woods turn to a brown/purple fuzz, just the silhouetted branches visible against the sky. The promise of cold.