mist and fog, visitors, shadows

A misty morning makes me think of the difference between mist and fog. The weather forecast on Radio 4 this morning speaks of "mist and fog". Mist is beautiful. It reduces definitions but does not obscure them. It suggests mystery and contains a light of its own. Fog, as in the second paragraph of Dickens' Bleak House, is disgusting, opaque and penetrating. "The yellow fog that rubs it back upon the window panes... licked its tongue into the corners of the evening," wrote T S Eliot, describing the same thing. With our Clean Air Act, that sort of fog seems to be a thing of the past. And you have to exclude the "fog", as Californians call it, which comes in from the sea in San Francisco, and which is white and reaches out in long, thin clouds, and is nothing like the old fogs of industrial cities like London; more like mist.

It's pleasing to think of the groups of people from different continents which write and visit blogs and comment on them, part of a global village.

As I pass the empty basement of a house into which the sun is shining, shadows of passers-by, myself included, move along the white wall above the empty floorboards.