First gentle mention of spring.

I know, i know, as soon as I say something we will be having snow blizzards and hail. So I'll say it very quietly. I think it's on it's way.

The Union Canal still covers with ice during the night, thin enough for swans to force their way through (that must hurt), but thick enough for ducks to stand on. The ice is so fine and so transparent it seems like they're standing on water (well, technically they are). And yet, at the side of the frozen canal, snowdrops pop their pretty heads from under the dead grass.

Snowdrops by the frozen Union Canal.

These were the first ones I have spotted, but soon they started poking out everywhere, I have never seen so many snowdrops in my life. I always thought they were this delicate, shy, perhaps even endangered flower, and it turns out they have colonised Edinburgh.


What further restores my faith in spring is a little chance meeting I had the other day. There he was, standing on a stone in the middle of the river, his breast as white as a bunch of snowdrops, the rusty belly and dark brown wings, the sparkle in his eye, the whole thing. His spindly legs supported a tubby little body with a comically short tail, which he held up high. He watched me, and I watched him. Perhaps nervous, he started bobbing up and down like a cork on a wave, as if he were curtsying me, and then he ran into the stream, straight in, into the deep water, disappearing under the brown waves, and, within a second, back out again. I laughed to myself with surprise and delight, and, perhaps offended, he flew away, wings beating frantically to support his tubby round boy in the air, buizzing as if he were a beetle, not a dipper. Lovely bird.