Recoil

3.10 pm: the quivering light and warmth cry out for touch, but your blurred, sweaty hands recoil in shock, touch nothing.

Like new

12.00 noon: clusters of unfurling bright green leaves make patterns on an even brighter blue - the whole sky like a crisp, new printed cotton curtain.

Drunken

8 am: the wild wind advances, noisy and unguided, kicking over all loose objects in its drunken path.

Flutter

this is the season
of big yellow skips - their blue
tarpaulins flutter

Stretched

8.05 am: the forecast says cloudy with rain, hail, thunder, and snow in the north - time and tolerance stretched by too many weathers.

Jamaican

12.50 pm: rice 'n peas and thick brown gungy stuff - Jamaican comfort food is sunshine in the belly on a cold day.

Blurring

11.45 am: through the blurring drizzle, a frail young woman approaches, clutching a small baby to her breast - oh no, it's a large loaf of bread.

Tense

2 pm: just a mile or two up the road is tense, crowded poverty. Same shops, same buses, people about the same daily business - and a very different atmosphere.

Hunched

1.05 pm: the fine, sleety snow is visible only in the hunched, hunted posture of each passer by.

Fierce

2.30 pm: the wind is like a thousand tiny knives - not strong, but fierce and sharp and spiteful.

Bellowing

12.20 pm: in the park full of resoundingly bare trees, a single shock of billowing, bellowing blossom.

Imposed

2 pm: an old-fashioned Sunday imposed but once a year; suburban streets are empty, almost silent, restless.

Felt

11 am: the long-absent sunshine comes and goes; just a few minutes, seconds even, at a time - rarely has it felt more precious.

Warm

1 pm: the warm scent of white hyacinths, not quite snuffed out by chilled and stagnant air.

Reel

9.50 am: there's a small man outside in the street with a very large wooden reel of cable hoisted on his shoulder - disconcertingly low tech!

Aching

6.20 pm: lighter evenings and aching cold - these things don't go together; oh, unforgiving, out-of-kilter season!

Perishing

3.30 pm: 'perishing cold', old people used to say when I was small; no surprise that the once-familiar phrase resurfaces today -   that's exactly how it feels.

Evoking

2 pm: when we call something eye-watering, it's often at least partly a metaphor, evoking emotional as much as physical sensation. Nothing metaphorical about today's cold.

Not

3.30 pm: snow like a child's toy 'snowstorm', fine and powdery. It looks so soft and gentle, but the wind chill and the interludes of icy sleet are not.

Fallen

3.45 pm: the f has  allen o   the ca é - one piece missing and the rest becomes random and meaningless.

Embedded

10.05 pm: the word 'embeddedness' embeds itself. Four shelving, rocky strata: in the chilly evening they reverberate.

Morphed

3.40 pm: oh, the air, the light, so soft - so soft, you think the season's morphed - it's spring! But you know that soon, with a shiver, it will all shut down again. Until it doesn't.

Plunged

2.20 pm: The room grows darker, then the keyboard disappears, then thunder, lightning, rain against the window: plunged into a dim, damp place.

Dodging

3.50 pm: a tantalising glimpse of fragile sunshine that brightens but barely warms; no sooner here than it's dodging clumps of cloud and preparing to dip behind the rooftops.

Jangling

6.09 pm: jangling fiddles shake the radio; a car door slammed in the street shakes the window; the quietly grating sound of a yawn that becomes a sigh.

Flattened

2 pm: it's the season of shadows - look down and look around and there are all these flattened tree-prints stamped across the roads and footpaths, lawns and walls and doors.

Falling

1 pm: that cold, spiky stuff is falling from the sky again, but the air has grown warmer, thick and muddy - weather that jabs and at the same time stifles.

Quivering

11 am: outside the florist's shop the potted red and yellow polyanthus spread their frilly velvet skirts, quivering and shivering in the sunshine and the icy wind.

Driven

6.20 am: the croaking of seagulls driven far inland by gales at sea; a heavy silence, then the muffled swish-swish-swish of a passing car.

Chilly

6 pm: something between hail and sleet taps insistently on the window; fingers of cold fumble their way inside, trace chilly patterns on the walls and ceiling of the darkening room.

Bobbing

11.20 am (Radio 3 CD Review): the Handel excerpt is a coracle filled with notes bobbing on the waves, and behind it another and another, happy as a line of swimming ducklings.

Creep

3 pm: water pours off the edge of my umbrella; one shoulder, soaked, turns a darker shade of green and a dark, wet border creeps upwards from the hem of my coat, flaps heavily against my legs.

Raining

6 am: it's raining on the red car parked beside the street-lamp and the lamp illuminates the droplets trickling from the shiny roof and down the windows.