I'd had in mind a new, alternative route for a few days now (given that my previous one seems to have been closed-off as a bird sanctuary), so this morning I decided to give it a go.

Almost as soon as I set off I realised this was going to be a tough walk - there was a bitterly cold north-easterly wind blowing across the plain. The periodic sunny spells did little to alleviate the chill, but I felt I had to keep going nonetheless.

The ground looked fairly interesting, I noticed.

Whenever I could though, I tried to pay attention to the sky. I hadn't seen it like this before. I kept thinking about a quote I'd read by the poet Rilke, who, when he was here, had observed a "sky of indescribable variation and magnitude". I tried to get into this appreciative frame of mind, but mainly kept thinking about how cold I was. Maybe Rilke had a warmer coat than me. He surely couldn't have found such lyricism in the sky if he had been this cold.

Here I felt was an interesting location to maybe do something. But on another day, when it was less cold. To be honest all thoughts I was having at this point were fractured and unresolvable. It was almost impossible to reflect properly on what could or couldn't be done here. However a very faint, half-formed semblance of an idea did pop into my head: might it not be good to introduce some sort of red ball into the landscape here? Almost losing the feeling in my fingers, and with eyes watering from the wind, I was unfortunately unable to carry this speculation any further.

This whole thing about what I was telling myself were "arctic" conditions should all be relativised of course; obviously it wasn't actually that bad. I'd even been trying to come up with a theory about the inevitable difficulties of getting anything done on days when it wasn't suitably still or warm enough to stop for a while and reflect. To physically stop, that is, in order to properly take in what is around you. But then what about arctic explorers, or mountain climbers? They seem to find it possible to continue to function mentally in genuinely inhospitable conditions. Was I just being feeble? Around this point a man and his dog walked past. They both seemed to be functioning fairly normally. Perhaps I would too if only I was given the luxury of a simple task to carry out, such as walking a dog. Perhaps this was the secret of Rilke's success.

As I walked home I decided that it was impossible to judge whether or not my new route had been a success. I began to feel an overwhelming sense of failure. I had achieved nothing. What irritated me most however was the banality of this failure: I seemed to have been defeated by nothing more than the fact that the weather had been bad.