Walking across the icy corridor of the Bridge over Troubled Water, the steel mesh barriers, winter white with a thick frosty layer, are hiding the muted cars streaming along the dual carriageway below.
Gazing upwards, into the thick arctic mist, the sun has frozen over, and reflects like a white coin to reach out and pluck from the midday heavens above.
An optical illusion hanging in the sky.
Rubbing my chilly hands together, pressing them to my cold chapped cheeks, I feel the wind driving down the road towards Mill Hill, as I walk past the social distancing folk, who, clapping hands to mouths, turn my thoughts to the Virus and this nation frozen in fear.
Trekking over the frozen earth, over the churned-up footprints in the mud – now as brittle as concrete – I make tracks down the narrow steps towards the secret gateway to Mill Hill.
Everything is white, draped in a thick blanket of frost, the hedgerows, bushes and trees all kissed by the icy breath of a riotous Jack Frost.
I wind my way upwards, up the thirty-nine steps cut into the undergrowth path that weaves its way to the top of Mill Hill – ever upwards, through these winter wonderland tunnels of the overgrown natural ice palace, and feeling my heart burst into life, I feel alive to the elements.
And emerging at the wind-swept summit of Mill Hill, submerged in the white ocean mist, a handful of families drift into view like ghostly spectres cast in cloaks of invisibility.
Stomping along the cold hard path back homewards, through the thick bramble hedgerows, a Robin Redbreast flits enigmatically between the bushes. A survivor of the cold, who adorns a million Christmas cards. I think on the childhood nursery rhyme ‘who killed cock robin’, and sigh with a frozen breath of sadness and nostalgia at lost innocence.
Back home, in the warmth now, Bob Marley is booming out of the stereo speakers. ‘Coming in from the Cold’ rings out, and an image surfaces of Bob and Rita Marley cooking porridge over the fire, in the doorway of their ramshackle shack in St Anne’s. How they beat an exodus from the trenches of Trench Town, in the years of poverty and no dough before they became reggae legends.
And I dream of the warm waters of Bull Bay, lapping onto the white Jamaican sands, a million miles away where the sun never freezes over.