I haven’t wanted the rain to come and wash away our lovely white blanket of snow, but it has its own beauty. The air is still and the raindrops pelt straight down in closely packed parallel lines which are unusually vertical. I stand at my caravan’s wide window and watch them, bouncing off the rounded sandstone copes on the wall or vanishing into the snow in front of me. Something about their straightness and linearity is very appealing, a change from the distracted, dancing drift of the snowflakes or the hard, angular momentum of the hail.
The sound is pleasing too, a precise patterning on the aluminium roof, gentler than the loud battering of the hail, more satisfying than the absent settling of the snow. The rain comes down directly, with thoroughness and vigour, and perhaps it’s that I’ve missed during these six days of snowy abandonment, when roads have been impassable, work delayed, and the world slowed and silenced.
The snow has been beautiful, soothing and serene, but it’s time now to move. It’s time now to wash our eyes and ears and step out.
Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
8th January 2026