Day 2 of my resolution to use this space more frequently, I hope you don't mind. Your comments and messages yesterday were so kind and uplifting, thank you.
Today was the kind of sharp, luminous day when Catbells looks like a wonky slice of carrot cake with a light dusting of icing sugar (I have to thank Rick at Faeryland, Grasmere for that observation). The patterns in the ice were echoing the bark spirals on my favourite local tree; who I have imaginatively named Tree Friend (I'm terrible at names). The good thing about Tree Friend is that even in a pandemic it is possible to give him a hug, so he's currently storing up all the hugs I can't give friends and family. This is a tree I need to draw, it has a real personality - even without emoji eyes. I'm really loving the tree drawings made by Sarah McIntyre and Phillip Reeve at the moment, they collaborate on a wonderful series of kids books about a flying Dartmoor pony called Kevin and have a long standing tree drawing thing going on.
I so wanted to crunch through the iced puddles but they were too pretty to break; even so my footsteps made it creak and groan and shatter at the edges, like the crust on a creme brûlée. Nutmeg and I had to hide in the gorse bushes for a while to avoid John the farmer with his sheepdog; he's a flighty cat and would have run in panic rather than letting me pick him up. I do worry that he will have to adapt quickly to a new, probably less remote home.
There, I've blogged two days in a row (and after 11 years I still hate the word blog), now I can celebrate that small achievement and add it to my store of positives, along with hot baths, audio books, lots of tea and plenty of toast. How are you coping?
In other news I've applied to be part of an exhibition at Rheged which is part of the Through the Locking Glass project, Cumbrian artists reflecting their experiences during lockdown. I'm still not sure when this will happen but won't it be wonderful to visit galleries again!
The sun reappeared last Thursday and after braving the madness of market day Keswick in the Easter holidays I came home and trudged up the valley to lie down on the footbridge for a think. Lying on my back, on the sun warmed wood and looking straight up at the sky, the fells seemed to lean over me in a dizzying way that confused my phone into auto rotating the photograph I took ( the one below). I was only slightly worried that the more serious, less horizontal walkers on the tops would assume I had collapsed; more concerned that vertigo would send me rolling off into the water. I basked in the sunshine feeling a little like I was looking down on the ravens who were flying aileron loops and barrel rolls, apparently just for the joy of it. Perhaps one of those walkers will will read this and be able to stop worrying; my last post was a lesson in never assuming total anonymity or invisibility just because I feel alone - one of those runners I described passing me as I wrote, turned out to be the lovely 
Anyway, I was happy to be outside with the sun in my face. After an endless winter I'd started to doubt my love of the fells and their ability to provide any kind of solace. I had a lot of thinking to do and it's easier to think near water don't you find? I was meant to be contemplating ten years of Witchmountain, ten years since getting my fabulous degree and this blog post was supposed to be all fanfares and party hats but, well of course this is real life. I ended up doing a trawl though 10 years of blog posts for entirely different reasons. Here she is, the Queen of the Mountains, the last of the Westwood Studio kittens (my parent's farm), the end of a long line of familiars, the "bloody cat", the muse for Rupert's silly songs, she of the impossibly untouchable, temptingly fluffy tummy and lethal claws, the last of my Snilesworth companions... now only the imaginary bear is left.
The house is quiet today, I keep hearing the ghost of a bell but for the first time in my life I have no animal company. Hey ho Toast, happy hunting; I'm glad the sun shone on your last day.
Goodness! Are you still with me? I'm pretty conflicted about tragic pet posts -there is so much love, so very much, but I couldn't help feeling how lucky she was to be able to leave peacefully, with dignity and without pain. As soon as we returned from the vets a bird landed on the windscreen and wouldn't leave, Pied Wagtail, Polly-Wash-Dish, silly bird. Without voicing it at the time we both had the same thought, a transmigration of souls perhaps.
The 
The second super exciting thing is that I got asked to provide images for two poetry pamphlets due for publication in May. Polly Atkin, from Grasmere, has been been so good to me since I first met her online around the time I moved the Lakes. Her poems have at times wrung deeply suppressed tears from me and on a more practical note she once leant me her swimming costume for an impromptu dip in Grasmere so I'm stupidly happy that one of my cyanotypes will be gracing the cover of her latest pamphlet. The two are published by 
More of that strange connectedness of life as my dad is just about to launch the project he has been working on with poet 
Reading: I just finished a proof copy of "The Psychology of Time Travel" by Kate Mascarenhas, out in August. Watching and thinking about ...[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkoML0_FiV4&w=560&h=315]