Neighbourly times.

It's been an exciting week weatherise. Snow and ice. Wind - ferocious, with flickering lights, so I walked around the house with a maglight in my pocket and stationed candles everywhere just in case. Pity I couldn't find the matches. If that wasn't drama enough in this backwater, my wheelie bin blew away after the pick-up truck had been. I wandered around the neighbourhood searching wistfully for it until an elderly lady spotted me and knocked on her window to call me over. A Good Samaritan had taken HER bin in unbeknownst to her; she had seen mine lying alone in the road, thought it was hers and taken it home with her. Luckily Chloe had put the house number on the bin when it belonged to her - they cost £30 to replace. None of this was a dramatic as the night a friend spent up in the hills when a tree fell within 10' of her house. The drive up to it is already blocked to all but tractors. I'm glad I live in suburbia! There's hardly a tree big enough to cause damage to a Wendy House round here.

After the wind we had one day of absolute calm, roads dry and ice-free and snow totally disappeared, but we woke yesterday to white car shaped mounds in front of the houses again and urgently cheeping birds. I've already spent £20 on them this year. Don't they know times are hard for all us creatures.

I didn't have to go out, had planned a day of cooking for the freezer against the arrival of the Wreckers so it was a surprise to see my car and pathway cleared by mid morning. I went round to thank my next-door neighbour, a young electrician with the RAF, who is deeply depressed because his wife, also RAF, is in the Falklands until February. He had been posted to Italy at the same time, poised to attack Libya, but the death of Gaddafi sent them all home again and he is desolate to be wifeless. Luckily he is as unsociable as me and doesn't want to be visiting, but still I feel worried about him. He says they both hate children - so no point in inviting him around over Christmas. He's volunteered for guard duty.

There's nothing like a bit of adversity for getting to know ones neighbours, a point I wish our PM would ponder.

I dragged myself out into the weather on Wednesday to attend a lecture on stained glass, finding, to my dismay, that the Brits don't have a good reputation for this craft and the good stuff, from the 13th century onward, is all on the other side of the channel. I remember seeing a breathtaking exhibition of Chagall's stained glass on the Belgian border withFrance a lot of years ago. The lecturer was sticking to the Christmas story so there wasn't much od Chagall, whose subjects were more often Old Testament of course. I'd very much like to do a stained glass trail round France, but it seems unlikely.

I made the mistake of buying a real tree, raised in captivity so it will hopefully survive coming indoors for a while, I just don't feel I can bring it in yet for fear it gets soft....oh the responsibility!