2009 has mostly been cold so far.

The difference between -1 and -11 is astounding. I laid in bed the other night, took the sleeping bag from over my head and let the heat seep out of my face and into the freezing air. I could feel the cold sucking the heat out of me and my face felt like i was melting into the air. Creepy. I whipped the sleeping bag over my head to create a nice pocket to warm up with my breath as was as snug as a bug.

Mornings are the hardest bit, we often have to break the sponge-scourer thing out of a block of murky ice and then defrost it on the stove so that we can wash up. We have to save the last bit of water in the container so we can get more water, which will go through a cycle of solid and liquid until it is used to defrost a tap.

I have always rained scorn on people who dress their dogs up in coats. Cold has turned my dog gay. In the night he likes to snuffle about at all hours, and will often shed his blankets, which then need replacing or we will wake up to a meek looking shivery dog trying to get into our sleeping bag. In my defence, the pooch poncho is brown, aside from the maroon bits, and it is made out of 3 wale corduroy, in accordance with one of my demands. I found him trying to shred it the other day and though I scolded him, I was secretly proud.

I have also become very aware of the variance in quality of tea lights. We use a lot of them and have even become sad enough to develop a favourite. We had some of them from the garden centre down the road and they required a great deal of attention to light and then died in about half an hour, with most of the wax unburned. Useless. Bolsius candles from the market will last for about 4 hours, almost to the minute, will burn all of the wax and are easy to light. Ideal.

We are running out of heat logs which means either re-order or start using other sources of wood. The welding dude whose workshop is on the farm has a mate with a big pile of wood which we are investigating.

Other than that, it has all been very laid back. We eat well, personally, rather too well in fact having put on a few grams since I moved in, we are warm in the evenings and nights and cold in the mornings, I have paid off more debts and we have not so far been mistaken for gypsies and hounded out of the neighbourhood on the wrong end of a pitchfork. We keep getting invited to increasingly weird dinners with the farmers and I have taken up archery.

It is however illegal to hunt rabbits with a bow and arrow in the top field beyond the pigs. So I won't be doing that. A guy here who has recently closed his adventure sports company has a barn full of archery and mountain biking kit that he is flogging cheap so I intend to obtain a compound bow (very dangerous, myeh heh) and some of the associated gubbins (like arrows), and do some shooting in the field, at targets. A mans gotta have a hobby other than fantasising about women about land rovers.