In December, it snowed heavily in Cambridge, so I went out one day to take pictures. Having spent a some time looking at the landscape and taking pictures I wasn't entirely satisfied with, I then did that thing I usually do: notice some minute detail and spend twenty minutes taking photos of it. In this case, it was a set of icicles stuck to the underside of a car, with the setting sun lighting them from behind.

As for the pictures of the rose, there's a story behind it. More than three years ago, I taped a single rose to the front door of this woman I liked. Since the roses had come in a bundle, I chose to stick one of its siblings into the soil of my back garden.

We've now been very happily together for two and a half years - and the rose is blooming, in December, despite having been mobbed by weeds, trampled, and repeatedly uprooted in the intervening time.