Jedi mind powers

Softer, softer. Haziness prevails. Not a gleam. Nary a glint. Neon signs and traffic lights suddenly spun colourful candy floss haloes. Cars, condensation-matte, pass by with a muffled sssssssssslish, sending up a few hundred thousand more miniature droplets to hang suspended with the other umpty-billion cutting the visibility and seeping into your clothes. Rain in stealth mode. People loom out of the haze with unwittingly cinematic drama, fading in like the Death Star or horizon-breaching Lawrences of Arabia. A frozen Arabia.

Jack Frost

This fantastic shot of frost in Leicestershire by Owen at Gone Walkabout.

The frost has come. Cambridge glitters liquidly under its crackling, melting dressing of crystals, like an artificially delicious-looking roast chicken sprayed with glycerin. The relative humidity is 99%. We're walking through water. The soft, mossy, worn and greying edges of the beauty of the town are sharpened into shearing lines and planes, and everything is too beautiful. Every mote of dust, cobweb and puddle of crumbling stone is festooned with facets turning their over-pretty new angles this way and that in the watery winter sunlight. It is English history in a Tiffany's display cabinet with a halogen lamp set over it. My eyes hurt.

Tuesday haiku

Frost furred keys rattle
Young blackbird spot adjusts, puff
light technical clothes

Question hour

The third in an occasional series on the keywords with which Xtinpore snares the unwary googler.

This week's Beautiful Insanity award to:

egg yolk eyebrow growth

Yes, well. I meant it rather more metaphorically.

The Sorry I Wasted Your Time, Dude compensation prize goes to everyone contributing to this week's number one search phrase with a bullet:

being in love

You poor, poor little babies. Are you googling your symptoms? Not even google can help you. And to the person who was looking for a Gem and the Holograms t-shirt? Yeah. I was more of a Masters of the Universe girl myself.

Gettin' festive with it

This brilliant shot from Simon at eyematter

I really, really love Christmas. It's the last great Western festival. I have a passing shred of pity for everyone, including the Christians, who are trying to carve out their own bit of religious and/or cultural identity from behind the massive inflatable Santa in their town square, but frankly? Whatever. I love the fact that the "meaning" of Christmas is being lost. It's turning back into its real self -- a great big mother of a celebration involving traditions borrowed, stolen and appropriated from everywhere where it's winter in December -- an excuse to decorate everything, drink hot, intoxicating substances, and eat foodstuffs made of things preserved from the Spring. I love that everywhere is bedecked -- the shiny wooden bar at the local pub, the streets glimmering with tiny lights and large, the windows, everyone's houses. That every store is stuffed with gifts and special, luxury foods that you eat just because they're special, luxury foods and that's what you do on a festival day. The sense of everyone preparing for something, a shared something.

There's even some minimalist berry-orientated ersatz-decoration going on in the window of my chrome-and-black-leather hair salon.

Of course, as time has gone by and I have left this blog woefully alone, gathering cobwebs and electronic dust-bunnies, the pressure grows to make a big re-entrance with something Fantastically Witty, or Perspicaciously Literary, or Amusingly Misanthropic, to justify one's catastrophic negligence. But naturally, I haven't had a thought with half a gleam on it, much less the blinding shine that impresses the blogging glitterati, for literally months. Among other things, I've been distracted by the adorable baby-blue backlit keyboard of my new love interest.

But I couldn't stand it any longer. I couldn't let my blog miss out. I had to get in here and put up some tinsel.