A Smell of Winter

That strange folded smell of autumn grows stronger, and I realise what it is now. Not the smell of autumn, but the smell of winter.
It tastes of cold playgrounds under grey skies, of streetlamps glimpsed on a distant hill as night falls, perhaps from a call centre, of the icy taste of the bones of leafless trees click-clacking together, of long afternoons, and a certain kind of woodsmoke smell, of coffeeshops in the early morning, entered before a long train journey, of attics holding fragments of your own past, of nights that sweep above you, vast and elongated as the sleep you wish you could fall into, and of course, of snow.

Inevitable really that this sudden icy-snap will soon visit Brighton. Bright light of the snow-silence, slipping to work on ill-salted pavements down gentle slopes that now seem steep inclines.
I remember the ssnow of last December.
The silence of the streets after dark, deserted as a city in a warzone.

I must go into that night outside soon, leave the gloomy comfort of the bedsit for that sharp and waiting air.
This morning, when I walked to worked, there were patches of ice.
Dull mirrors that soon melted, leaving only a ghost -a smell of winter- through these ever shortening days.