Will this winter ever end ? Is there actually one in sight? You know there's hardly been a more talked about theme all this week than this. The weather's constant ambushes, it's plunging cold, the sharp faced winds and the need for a hat at all times has driven this question hard.

It's coincided, and how aptly too, with the centenary of Edward Thomas's cycle ride from South London to Somerset's Quantock hills. Thomas was charged by his publisher to find Spring; he did, and one that's unrecognisable to today's bitter blue skies. His was ascending skylarks, brimming hedges, short showers, and elms ready to bloom into leaf. 

I would n't have known about Thomas's trip had the Guardian not published a piece about it, which avoided the lost idyll sentimentality that I know a clutch of other papers just could n't. 

Thomas's eventual book appears as much a meditation as a travelogue. The prose, as the article writer points out, is " on the very brink of poetry", which I can only attest to from the lines and excerpts from Thomas book included in the article. What is quoted though is like an aperitif, enough to want more. I shall read the book.

One line that is quoted resonated this afternoon; Thomas heard chiff-chaffs singing the further from London he went "...as if every note had been the hammering of a tiny nail into winter's coffin". Pulling my boots out of the Essex mud of Vange Marsh earlier this afternoon, a friend and I stumbled across a small red bed quaking with chiff-chaffs. A restless dozen of them. Almost humming bird like aerobatics. I can't forget a pair chasing each other with the lead chiff chaff almost able to turn a right angle at will inches from a thorn bush.