On a cold and frosty morning

Tuesday 1 Dec

With the first day of winter—and after threatening to on a few previous occasions—there was finally a good frost overnight.

Being this far north the crack of dawn is rather late in the day: sunrise is at 7:50am, and tonight sunset is just before 4pm 😯 ! This has the advantage, however, of permitting a more civilised hour for early morning photography.

I did my usual route to work but took a bit of detour into Port Meadow, where I rode through a couple of frozen puddles with a very satisfying crunch-and-squish. There was mist on parts of the river, and the skeleton trees were making striking silhouettes. Needless to say it was rather chilly. I tried rigging my scarf around my face for cycling, but all this succeeded in doing was to direct breath onto my glasses and fog them up. The glasses need a demister as well as windscreen wipers. The other difficulty on such a cold day was operating the little digital camera while wearing gloves.

I took a whole bunch of photos at Port Meadow and then in University Parks because the light effects were great (the little camera has done quite well for its brain size and lens quality). There are two pages of photos (about 700kB each), covering Port Meadow and the Thames, and then University Parks and frosty leaves (the pages are linked, so you don’t have to come back here).