Holbeck Winter Magic

In the first week of the new year we went for a lovely walk down Cemetery Road, east through lower Beeston and then Holbeck where they are building new flats. To Bridge Road and the Slunglow theatre company. Back up towards St Matthews where we had sandwiches in the cemetery. Beautiful, quiet, green and the sun was fast going down behind the church from where we were sitting, still brightly illuminating the beautifully redecorated Meynell Heights.

The soon-to-be-enveloped-in-grey Kings Arms was dappled with gentle light and shade, what an attractive building. It was so clean and tidy and lovely to be there. Not many people around. A diminutive Yorkshire terrier approached and when he saw us he ran back to his human companion, cringing in his arms. He doesn’t like people the man said when he passed us, the black and tan cradled against his bosom. The way he looked at us and the way he said it clearly showed how the doggy had developed its dislike for people.

Onto Venus to drool over all the exotic fare, glad we had had something to eat earlier. Some Turkish tea for Diane and for me the brown mud, as always briefly leaving that what-is-that- taste? lingering on the palate. The alluring pictures displayed in the restaurant, my favourite the Ishak Pasha palace with Trabzon manastiri following close on its heels. I positively stare at them every time I go there, finding something new in the haunting pictures – longing for something lost – to gape at. What on earth can be missing?

When we got outside the dusk had settled in and the moon had risen in the east, full and orange, its effulgence blemished by the haze in the distance – the pictures I took not doing justice to the beauty of the scene. A jet liner vaping orange was streaking westwards through the pink sky. Over the Evangelical church the azure sky was sandwiched between the pink streaks of cloud – itself threatened by the darkening sky from above – and the yellow-orange of nautical twilight. Jack Frost was slowly spreading his ice and it was cold.

When we passed the City View Surgery the moon, smaller now, had climbed a fair distance into the sky.

Turning into Beeston Road an alarmed Blackbird chuddered anxiously before he broke into song, the first such rhapsody of the winter for us. Through the park we went on our way, the moon following us illuminating the underlining streaky cloud, bathing the park in a surreal setting as clear winter nights would have it.

At the fading of the light ice was starting to form at our feet and we couldn’t get home soon enough out of the strengthening icy breeze and into a warm lounge and the promise of hot chocolate.