Sunshine and Cactus

 

I think sunshine has a habit of making everything look better, and feel better, and sound better, and taste better. Here in Britain we live under a perpetual cloud. The winter sky is characteristically overcast, gloomy light turning everything into monotone. When the sun finally does manage to beam her face down at us, once the relentless clouds have given her the stage for a moment or two, the world is suddenly flushed with colours I never knew existed!

Wow, grass is THAT GREEN?! 

That tarmac is looking particularly handsome today!

My goodness, I never noticed how very pink those roses are.

Oh, glory days, this doorstep is the most gorgeous russet I have ever set my eyes on. Peonies nodding in sunlit breeze. Gleaming black railings against the stark white of a Kensington building.

Everything has a humming vibrancy when the sun comes out.

n.b The photo taken above was actually in Spain.

Ode to Britain’s Sunshine

Today the sun woke up after a long and dreary hibernation. She warmed up the world with her rays. She flooded crystal light through nooks and crannies, brightening up what was once so dull. She ignited every blade of grass, and when you peered through the dry, wintry boughs, she set on emerald fire the bushes lurking between.

She set the fog ablaze, creating a mystic haze that was swarming with glittering fairies. She yawned, and her open mouth spilled gold onto window panes, shimmering starkly next to brilliant white and glorious red brick.

She brought colour into the world, is what she did. England without sunshine is a dreary grey slab. The cold sees fit to drape its frosty tentacles over the landscape, breathing air that is metal in its harshness, and making it so breathing is painful. England without sunshine is gum spots on pavements being too bright, and rubbish in the gutter claiming the centre of visual attention. England without sunlight is pink faces and rolling beer cans, its a world over which one has spilled dirty paint water, so all the colours have run together, merging into a desolate, muddy grey mix. England without sunshine is a dirty colourless filter over the world.

And the minute the sun beams down upon us, England is once again crowned in glory.

Oh, world, England is such a beautiful country. With her rolling hills, charming knotted trees and grass so green the emerald princesses are jealous. Even her little winding roads with the small wooden fences on the side, the fringes of grass over grown and the brambly hedges have a magical charm to them.

I had forgotten I lived somewhere so beautiful.

I hope the sun doesn’t wait so long again to show her face, less the desolation of winter seep back into life again. I know there is some rigorous scientific explanation behind happiness and sunshine, but I don’t want to think about that. I want to believe that the sunshine has magical powers, that it wields a paintbrush and a magic wand. That it turns squat houses huddled sombrely along an icy road in a grey stain into majestic, beautiful buildings with vibrant white trellises and bricks made from the finest clay and fired in the hottest ovens.

They say only those descended from the elves can see the Dryads in this picture. Can you?