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.