Jewel of a Grey and Dreary Day

This deep in November, and the days seem viewed as if through the tiny portholes of an imaginary, ill-conceived submarine. Slow drift along the ocean bed of these hours, late November is a permanent nightfall, and those thin and pale slivers of day are fragile and inconsequential things; ice cracked on a puddle, reflection of kitchen-yellow light fragmented and splintered. A crystalline mundanity, jewel of a grey and dreary day.
This morning and yesterday, while sat at my desk at work, looking out the window, I saw the sky had produced a sun-dog. Sky dogs are an atmospheric phenomenon where a coloured patch of light appears in the sky, on one side or other of the sun, a phantom star caused by ice crystals. Yesterday and today's sun-dog didn't last for long, a fading phantom of a phantom. By the third or fourth phone call of the day, they had gone completely.
Walking back tonight, a slow along a New Church Road that seemed to last forever, then slow through the aisles of Tescos looking for sellotape and wrapping paper for Em's birthday presents. Slow rain, and the slow concrete-heavy burn of the night where even the stars, even if they were imagined, seemed heavy and lost, drifting on cosmic, stagnant eater. The rain was cold and thick and damp, drizzly puddles a storm for a few discarded leaves, and the pavements slick with a twisted ankle promise.
This deep in November, and the days slip away from us all. The afternoons are robbed of romance, and the mornings of wakefulness. Leave your soul in dreams you can't remember, and then into the slow underwater push through the day;
this deep in November, even movement is difficult. Joints of this undersea journey lubricated with oil and faltering honey, an industrial, broken shifting. We crawl along the seabed, 40 watt bulbs trying to illuminate the late autumn sea-monsters, the Kraken-rumours we can't hear, the Leviathan and Behemoth that swim and shift under grey and dreary English skies.