At the beginning of the week we had the sort of rain that would have got Noah out of his armchair: this culminated in the river Dyfi spilling millions of gallons of water onto the floodplain until there was a veritable sea downstream from the bridge. For 24 hours Machynlleth became cut off from both north and south, and at least one home was badly flooded. By Thursday the waters had subsided again leaving a tangle of debris and broken fences for the farmers to clear up. 

On Friday it turned frosty and this morning we woke to the brightness of snow: the landscape was transformed once again. I got out early but at least one lot of dog walkers was ahead of me. Crunching and snapping underfoot in tiny seismic explosions the snow clung to every twig and branch in gobbets or delicately frozen filigrees. Yellow gorse flowers glowed like struck matches inside crystalline cages. My terrier dashed about nose to the ground  – what is it about snow that seems to amplify scent trails? The sky was bruised purple and looked fit to burst. I met a couple of other wide-eyed, snow-struck walkers: “more on the way” we pronounced knowingly.

I was enjoying myself, but for many people all this ‘weather’ on top of a remorseless deluge of Covid news at the fag-end of January, must seem like the pits. Being forced to live in the shaky gap between vaccination and infection, in a closed-up town dumped on by floods and ice – is too much.

But, of course, this grim story is only one version of what is going on: It was light until 5.30 yesterday evening; I heard my first song thrush give voice – admittedly rather tentatively, less strident for now; some snowdrops have turned down their bells, dreaming of early pollinators; and the rooks at the bottom of our road are in constant conversation about the new season. It seems to me that we are no longer looking into winter but out towards spring.

But walking home through the muffled town I was reminded of this ‘life depends on your viewpoint’ stance when I noticed a blackbird foraging in the gutter, no more than a yard away. I was charmed by its confiding behaviour until it struck me that this wasn’t friendliness but desperation. If the snow and ice persist it will be hard pushed to find enough calories to make it through the night.  Cute though it looked, cocking a bright yellow eye at me, it was trying to survive in the mortal gap between enough and too little. Mostly our affluence masks the inherent fragility of life but Covid has ripped this away – leaving us as vulnerable as a blackbird on an icy morning.