Ghin on the phone to Mama

It has been so cold here over the past week. It began snowing on Wednesday and it's been snowing now on and off. Yesterday as i lay in bed wishing that i could float away somewhere and return when i felt better it snowed too. The flakes came down as if someone had sliced open a feather duvet and it just came falling and falling.

So silently and softly. Snow is magical. But today it is cold. Today it's left a layer of hard ice on everything. Frozen snow tastes like the ice in the fridge. The rime that collects on freezers that can't self defrost. Which makes me think, ice has a taste. Frozen water has a taste.

It's been bad, being unable to turn up to the blog. I've been awful these past two weeks. And it shows in the daily routines. It feels unsatisfactory missing this bit of creativity. Maybe that's why i overate last week.

Project Lovely Sacred Spaces has ground to a slight halt. Although today it did resume a bit when i got some sweet pink cloth to cover the computer table in the living room. It is this piece of functional but not very nice furniture from Ikea. It's ok like, probably a design classic. But for now i think it's be fine with a piece of pink cloth on it.

We visited this farm in Omagh today run by Hamilton Kee, this farmer who won the Nature of Farming award last year for Northern Ireland. The place was an old rambling 19th century gentlemen's residence which his father had bought over in the 1950s. It's one of those amazing places which are filled with stories and possibilities. Put together over the year and eroded by time, it was no less impressive than a geological wonder - a canyon or an ancient woodland.

February is not the best time for seeing anything. The world is dead. Despite the peaking snowdrops and the heady scent of indoor hyacinths, everything else is gone. Only structures remain. Trees against cold bare sky, drops of water hanging to corroded metalwork, puddles and eddies, the remains of last year's floods. Fields are decaying stubbles. The larch has dropped its needles and faded. Sunflower heads shrivelled and emptied. Mist hangs over fields and rivers like ghosts. And in this we walk. It is so quiet. Our breath and footsteps keep time with each other. Beneath our feet snow and ice crunch. We come to stop in what appears to be a path, wide enough for a car. We stand under the old hawthorn and beech. This used to be the old road to Derry, he tells us. This is where King James march on his Seige of Derry.

For a single second it seems momentous that this was where this event took place, and then it seems comical. In the dead of winter, this inconspicuous place which has been forgotten but by the mosses and lichens that have gathered on the branches, the badgers that have left that trails, the rabbits that have made burrows and runs, this would have been where men were dragged to battle. To Derry! they may have shouted, but who would have heard them...and years later this would be written of in history books. Feted, reviled, celebrated, condemed. And this was where it all happened - well it partly happened.

Today, nothing. Falling stone work, a farm gate held together by some barbed wire. Four people in wellies, marvelling at field fares and redwings, reed buntings and buzzards.

Our wars have passed, time has moved one - and stood still.

Is there anything worth dying for - no, nothing. But everything, everything, is worth this our one life.