West

I went for Kaffee off Kurfürstendamm with my friend Once Was Architect today, shaking out my lungs in the frozen air, stamping my feet and my Einzelfahrschein AB against the solid comfort of German trains, zurückbleiben bitte, pink-and-purple cubist seat covers and a red button, please shut the doors on cold days.

Literaturhaus café, wonderland of dark wood and padded-leather corners, majestically average coffee for €3.20 and an arresting waitress with her pad holstered thigh-level on an antiqued belt and a rope of peppered dark hair sheafed at her collar. She thanked me in French.

Mobius

I have a picture of the winter in my mind like Christmas lights on the other side of the window. It is cozy in here, a nest lined with your books and quilts, cake tins and 2011's closely guarded resolve, hot coffee in the morning and fluffy socks on the wood floors. But the truth is I am struggling, vaguely stir-crazy, cut and bruised and afraid now of the cold and ice outside and the glacial braindeath hard on the heels of perpetually cold feet, terrifying thoughtlessness that delivers nothing but images of the blood running blue in your fingers. My skull makes defrosting pipe sounds and my eyes are full of the grit of no new view and there are too many days still to come.

Tail end

Snow, graupel so small it blows in coils of impossible wind-mocking vectors like stomped polystyrene. A family walks the other way, kids in snow-suits with reinforced knees and banana-bunch gloves. More families. Where are they going? Something is happening, as it often is. I don't know what it is. As I often don't. At the supermarket there are tall pyramids of beer on display and peanut-flavoured snack foods. Chocolate Weihnachtsmänner on sale at the back. Shops are selling fireworks for tomorrow, the snow outside dredged with foil confetti hearts and stars. And hats. Tall striped caricature top hats. Sombrero-type things with boa trims. Ones with bells. Hats are a thing.

I abandon the shopping in the hall and curl my frozen red-violet hands into the sheepskin on the living room floor, ow god ow ow while my fingernails stubbornly wrest the blood back from the ice. I pack away the oats, the smoked trout. The fillet of pork, the noodles and split peas and the vegetables that fix me with their Proper Meal gazes. The year trails in after me with the cold, rapid-fire edits, Saarlacc. Triffid. Dead Hyacinth. Castaway, Lost in Translation, sheets of the masterpiece blown in the wind, the crunch of warm ashes underfoot, birds in the wrong clothes. I lean forward against the pull, hem of the coat in the doorjamb, and close my eyes but it has the advantage, damn it and its physics-of-my-mind, and I am afraid because the leaning is a comfort, somehow, like being on a train so crowded you no longer have to hold yourself up.

In the morning I talk to my brother, wit and warmth and dangerous perspicacity like hot glass just in reach, popcorn eyebrows and diegetic chords for DRAMA from the keyboard to his left. So real, for the love of god, so real the snap-chilled windows seem like fictions.

Later I make blueberry muffins out of a cookbook with muffin-shaped pages. The bell rings and they are kitsch-defying, golden purple-stained munch-fests, nutmeg-scented and smug in their satisfaction of the archetype. They look at me butterishly. I arrange them in a dish.

The blueberries were from Guatemala.

Little ice

It hasn't snowed yet. I yearn for snow, the magic of the far away and story book, Christmas card of places cold in December. Dancing fluffy flakes clumping and bursting like handfuls of paper torn into bits and thrown around with a kind of triumphant reproof. The odd, ear-muffling silence before, like the sound of the door closing on soundproofing. Everything white and crunchy and unlike itself. But if not snow, then frost.

Frilly, tiny fronds of ice clinging to everything, frozen silvery lichen. Crisping just short of silently underfoot, a milimetre of shiny ice on a recent footprint, a leaf curled and candied, crackle. A morsel-toting blackbird prints tiny greennesses on the clipped hedge dove-grey through the ice. White sheets everywhere, tyre-tracked on the road, over the courts, everywhere there is a shadow, suddenly where the sun don't shine blinged.

I break off a piece of a spider's web, hard for a split half-second like spun sugar, no time to think, a smudge of sticky cold between my fingerpads as though it had never been there.

Pony up

On Saturday, H and I went for a walk on Wicken Fen. Wicken is pretty unusual, for a bit of fenland, because it lacks that operatic bleakness that generally characterises the breed.

First we took a spin through the little National Trust shop and tearoom, festooned with nest boxes and baskets, bird-feeders, handy polar-fleece rugs for the back of the Rover, postcards of ringed plover and fantastically cliched yet totally fabulous wildlife photographs with limited edition numbers pencilled importantly on to them.

In one corner were the wares of a certain Nadine Anderson, Basketmaker. (Sidebar: I am completely, utterly seduced by these sorts of identifications. Lawyer. Poet. Ninja. Philatelist. Antiquary. Seamstress. Basketmaker. As soon as it has a name, I want to be one. It is a deadly combination of the power and romance of Words, and the endless desire for Identity. I'm suckered in every time. But I digress.) So Anderson, Basketmaker's things were lovely beyond belief, and infinitely lovelier because they're made of the Fen. Willow stems and cherry wood cut straight from the mud and magicked into something with a handle. (Sidebar #2: I also have a thing for handles. See previous psychology about names. I don't think Freud would have needed to get very deep into an analysis of "I can't handle it", n'est-ce pas?)

H bought me a gorgeous willow and black maul basket with a curved cherry handle in very much the style of Red Riding Hood, which I slung over my arm and off we went into the forest. I mean fens.

I was an insanely gorgeous day, with a crispy wind that tasted like a gimlet and cinematically buttercup-coloured sunshine bouncing off everything. Of course, this had brought out more wilderness punters than just ourselves, and the view over the reeds was alive with red and blue and green North Face fleeces and puffer jackets along with a couple of hardcores toting half a king's ransom in birding optics.

We saw gulls and partridges, widgeons, teals and bluetits, a merlin and a short-eared owl prowling for dinner, a pair of stone chats flirting from the tops of the reeds. We faced off good-naturedly with the Highland bull, with his fantastic Muppet horns.

A yearling pony blew thoughtfully on our hands with his fuzzy apostrophe nostrils. H and I blew back.

He seemed to know something I didn't.