winchester

It's a beautiful day and the sun brings warmth to the eleventh floor. The door is open and the Westway traffic resonates with an urban twang. Although it's still January, the day has a first hint of Spring to it. 

Whenever Spring peeks through the clouds, I find myself thinking of Winchester. Although I was never enamored of it, for reasons which are lengthy and fundamentally English, I find myself missing it. Winchester, the Winchester which I knew, was not the countryside, it was some corner of an old English provincial town, a kind of hinterland. My parents' house, at times my own, was on the edge of town. During the Winter, whole months would go by with low cloud, drizzle and damp. But, as the season turned, signalled by the appearance of daffodils on the banks of the Itchen, the mind would fast forward. To days when the walk up the hill would be balmy, to be undertaken towards dusk, the grass longer and docile under the final rays of the day. Or an evening in the garden of the Queen, pulling a jacket or sweater against the onset of chill as the Summer night faded. Or just the smell of the meadows as you ambled the seemingly over-familiar path down to St Cross, verdant, reassuring, nature's nurture pulling its underhand tricks.

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