A miserable winter's day

Today is Sunday, a quiet day for most of us and, here in London, a miserable one; the reason for this is the weather, though my mood is not a particularly sunny.

Despite the perception of many people who do not know London, the weather here is a fairly mild affair with few extremes in any direction - it's rarely extremely cold or hot and only occasionally presents a major problem. In fact the worst you can usually say about it is that it can be annoying, drizzly and dripping, making moving about less than congenial.

Today is slightly different, though it is wet and drippy (with sleet/snow actually): it is a dark, cold, miserable sort of day, of the kind better spent indoors in peace and quiet, near a fire of some description with a drink and a good book. But in a spirit of self-sacrifice I have decided to get out and about and chronicle this day for you, my reader (you know who you are and, if you don't by now, you are beyond any help that I can offer...), to help you share in this misery.

Are you affected by the weather? Do you like all your days to be sunny and bright, with birds gaily chirping and all of creation looking festive? Is your mood up or down depending on what is happening outside your window? If so, today you would be out of luck in London, as you can see from my photographs, simple as they are. Dreary, dark, wet and cold, unpleasant in a way that is not easy to describe, today would have had you running for cover, probably silently screaming...

Even I, who generally could not care less about the weather and what it's up to other than when it interferes with my planned wanderings, have found today a tad depressing. It may be that external factors are affecting me, bringing me down and making me blue (the cliches stop here, don't worry) and the weather is not to blame. It may be that today I had wanted a day of 'wandering about' weather so I could, as it were, 'go downtown' (thank you, Petula Clark). But today the weather annoyed me sufficiently to write about it.

Perhaps I had nothing better to do.