Amazing how some things stick with you. It is snowing a very pretty type of snow at the moment; I looked out onto one of the terraces and watched it coat the wooden planks and float around the naked trees.

I pressed my nose right up against the window, and it fogged up a little. I remembered a line I read in Little House on the Prairie when I was 7 or 8; there was snow outside, and the girls’ mother gave them thimbles with which to make designs & draw on the frosted window.