Skip to main content

Sunshine on the Snow

Ground hog day has come and gone and seems to predict another six weeks of winter- at least for Pennsylvania. Here in Estonia we don't really need rodents to tell us that the winter is going to stay for a while longer. Yet the quality of the winter is changing. The extraordinary darkness of December is gradually giving way to lighter days. At this time of the year, the length of the days grows very rapidly- a good five minutes extra daylight each day, so that even over a week or so, the feeling grows stronger that the near total daylight of high summer is on its way.

Yet, the winter itself continues with full force. It has been exceptionally cold and exceptionally snowy. As I write, the snow on my balcony is about a metre deep, and the piles of cleared snow in the car park top three metres. The skies are lowering grey with the promise of yet more of the white stuff. Yesterday was a clear, crisp day with the bright sunshine reflected on the white carpet in motes of diamond fire.

Taking a walk- slowly picking across icy and snow obstructed pavements- I came to the sea. There is a broken carapace of pack ice across the Bay of Tallinn. The dark channels of open water that are cleared to allow the ferries enter the harbour steamed in the cold. The view across to Viimsi peninsula seemed strangely foreshortened by the ridges on the ice, where the swans and other sea birds scrambled about in what seemed like a rather chilly misery. Yet everywhere there was light, the snow and the ice dazzling under the blazing sun.

The seasons are slowly turning and though we are winter-fatigued, longing to throw off the heavy winter coats, scarves, gloves, hats; at least the light gives promise of the brief, precious summer days that are coming.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more