A HAPPY LONER'S DIARY

It’s freezing cold. That’s why I have not written anything since my first post. It’s so cold you can’t think straight. Your whole body and mind are tense. You stoke a stove first thing in the morning and simply wait for a couple of hours until the room gets warmer. This is different from the first half of February with -10°C or -15 °C at most. Now its -25°C (true, this happened only once!) or -20°C in the morning. The Arctic cold seeps into the room and the kitchen through the old log walls and old-fashioned windows. It’s a traditional country house, spacious and elegant, built just before World War II. At around 11 a.m. I go outside. The sun is bright, the sky is a beautiful blue, the snow

I am a city-bred person who cannot live in the city. I understood this ten years ago when felt a desperate urge to move out. As deep into the country as possible. Ideally in wintertime, when the fields and the forests are hushed by the snow, when the lives of all that lives: of people, farm animals and wild beasts, as if transcend their habitual routines. White silence. Especially this winter. In recent years it has become rare ­as even the bitterly cold Arctic winds give up in the uneven battle of climate change. The silence has not disappeared, though, but it is not always white. And yet there is nothing better than the crackle of burning logs in the stove in the early morning hours, a mug