Moored up at Diggers, between Bradford on Avon and Bath, in the Avon valley. The boat next door is Kestrel, an old working butty. At dawn, the song thrushes are singing their winter song, and cormorants fly along the valley from their roost upriver. A pheasant is BOCKing from the woods, and a deer barks now and then.
Every day I've been down to the post office to send off orders, even in the drenching rain, which my sou'wester and new-to-me Rohan raincoat kept out, though the rest of me got very damp indeed. But now that the post-in-time-for-Christmas deadline is passing, things are quietening down.
Being so busy sending things off for other people's Christmasses, I've not done anything for my own, which is always low-key anyway; I was always quite happy to be working at sea over the Christmas season, when the fun was serendipitous and incidental rather than mandatory, which is what spoils it.
La cordonniere est toujours le plus mal chausse. This year, I solved the problem of not having sent cards to my friends, by marking St Bridget's Day instead, a time when the world is beginning to wake up again. I think I'll keep that up.
