cold snap

It's still very very cold here, and it's beginning to make me feel like a hibernating mammal of some kind. Actually, apart from hedgehogs and bears, I don't know any other mammals that hibernate, but maybe that's just because people don't talk about it enough, except David Attenborough obviously. Anyway, on days like today in Edinburgh when there's no light, and the sky looks like a huge sheet of grey paper, and the temperature makes your shoulders hunch up near your ears, and you want to eat all the time, and carry a hot water bottle around with you tucked into the front of your yoga pants, and you have to have a light on to be able to see to do anything, I think the bears and the hedgehogs are probably right. Maybe Badgers, too, maybe they stay indoors in winter. Making cups of tea and smoking their pipes and wearing woolly waistcoats and slippers. I think it's the dark that does it mainly, because if it's cold but there's sunshine and you've eaten something warming and you can still feel it in your stomach giving you energy, then you might want to go outside and skate or ski or yodel or walk on a hill or feed the birds in the gardens, but when it's nearly always dark then your body just says 'Do Not Be Stupid' to your brain, or the other way around, and your eyes close and your limbs go all floppy and you have to fall over and burrow under the covers and close your eyes and make little 'mmmnnnnmmmhhnnnmmmnn' noises. So it's probably rather amazing that I can even be bothered turning on the computer on days like this, and thinking out loud. So there.