If choral music could have a physical presence, this is what it might be like.
Low winter sun is the St Matthew Passion of weather. Light music, you could say. The son of God. The sun of God. It works both ways.
On such mornings it is as if God Himself were peeping over the edge of the world, pouring in His presence. The golden tide that sweeps across the land is a blessing that stops even the most work-obsessed among us. Who hasn't glanced from a train window and been momentarily transfixed by the beauty – by the way the world has been made new? That barn, that farm, that hedge even, seem to have been given a mystical presence by the sun: something in the way they sit this morning seems different, special.
Low winter sun transforms. Who hasn't swept down the motorway, the crash barrier-sliding sun seemingly a passenger at your side, and seen everything thrown into sharp relief around you, a world that is so often a dull five or six mega-pixels remade into a high-resolution paradise? Thank goodness you don't to have email the land this morning – it would take for ever to download ("Thanks for your note, but my machine can't deal with the jpeg. Any chance you could resend as four separate emails, maybe the hills and valleys on the first two and the farms and stuff on the others? Cheers!").
It is the same in the cities too. Suddenly, everything is an Edward Hopper painting. Victorian windows that you might normally never give a second glance become great shadow-filled statements, bays of mystery that change buildings into street corner galleons. The artist said all he wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a building: such days were made for him.
Meanwhile, a tiny army is busy in the parks and fields. The massed ranks of Her Majesty's Royal Hoar Frost Regiment are holding their fronds aloft for those that bother to notice. Illuminated brilliantly by the sun, each blade of a grass is a wonder, its frozen fractal of frost formed on frost deserving the Attenborough high-definition camera treatment (and an alliteration award too).
But let's not get carried away here (too late, I fear) – knowing my luck the weather today will be dreich and drear. Who, incidentally, happen to be my solicitors, should you wish to take action against the gloom.
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