Something hot in a cold country

It's cold in my world at the moment. My boiler died, and is being replaced at a sickening cost to my pocket. When they quoted me the price, I almost vomited - let's put it this way, it's not going to be a generous christmas this year! Anyhow, today the installers have bashed huge holes in my walls, and as night is falling the prospect of sleeping in a perforated apartment looms. So it is cold and damp, and I'm not liking it. I'd rather be on a beach, in sunshine.

But Christmas is coming, and the prospect of one whole week at my folks' place eating good food and drinking without consequence is a highly entertaining one. It will also be my nephew's first xmas, and I will be happily cooing and gurning in the warmth of family.

I've been feeling moments of love recently. Sometimes I well up with affection for people, apparently for the smallest kindness or communion. I have short, comforting smalltalk with a colleague about coping with the downers of work. The chat is brief but there is a sense of sincerity, such that we both suddenly appear vulnerable, making ourselves almost naked. Needing, and being needed; Longing, however temporary, and being longed for, however temporarily, is magnetically beautiful. I wanted to wrap her up in my arms, bury my head into her neck, breathe in her emotional exposure, infuse it with my own. Restraint, how difficult it was to maintain...

So how come I'm feeling so full of this emotion even at this, often the bleakest time of year? I don't know why... maybe it's the music on the radio at the moment. The kind that wraps you up in the 3 mins it takes to play. Royksopp, in particular. Perhaps also it's the arching back of the night at barely 5pm, the darkness calling for humanity to bond closer as we did before electricity. Who knows...