Driving to the dentist

I inherited a dread of dentists, and although unrecognisably calmer about the experience I was not looking forward to today's check up.  Added to that, our dentist is in the town we lived in last: not far, but with traffic so bad that I only go on school holidays, and have an appointment early enough to be guaranteed a parking space.  So, I left home just as dawn was about to break.

No photos because I was driving, but what a glorious experience that drive was!  A clear day with what I call a Tiepolo sky: pale blue with pink streaks and patches and wispy clouds.  I believe I call it a Tiepolo sky because of notes taken during art history lectures decades ago - not because I actually was so impressed with a painting I saw.  But fixed in my catalogue of labels it was immediately called to mind this morning.  Such skies seem to look even better when the trees' delicate twigs of fingers reach up toward the promised warmth of the rising sun.

Snowdrops were out in drifts.  Two houses in particular along the route which I had not taken for months are particularly spectacular.  And to accompany them the delicate froth of blackthorn - largely seen peripherally as I kept a close eye on appalling pot holes.  (Why is it that four wheel drivers whose vehicles are specifically equipped to cope with mud etc. drive toward the middle of the road so that us lower folk have to stop unless we wish a close encounter with pot-holes? - But it was too lovely a morning for a rant.)

At that time in the morning, through country back roads I also encountered two badgers: on alive, one dead, pairs of wheeling red kites, pheasants (some suicidal!), and a group of about a dozen young hinds.  All worth getting up in the dark for.