The weekend? What is that?

A few hours ago, I was downward dogging in my usual Saturday yoga class at the Y, when heavy snow began to fall outside the wall of windows. The room felt small and cosy as we stretched and strained, while outside grew light and impenetrable, and the buildings started to vanish. Toronto was beautiful by the time I got out - like Christmas, everything white and muffled, silent and still.

There is a lot of snow on the ground already, however. And it's only mid-January. This is not a winter like last winter, this is a real winter. In other words, an endurance test.

I've decided that it's well-nigh impossible to look good outside in the middle of January, at least if you have to make your way around the city on public transit. As I sit on the streetcar, I look at my fellow Canucks, bundled up in a variety of dark-coloured, shapeless, hulking coats, hats, mitts and boots covered with salt. The body and face disappear; all you can see is the quest for warmth. Which, taken one step further, is a quest for survival - as the tragedy of the elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer's, who managed to slip outside her home wearing very little and froze to death, showed us last week.

So let's bundle up in massive piles of cloth, my friends; we may not be pretty, but we'll be alive.

Quick! More amusing stuff to slough off the January blues. How about the article in the "Globe" about the woman who made a big replica of Leonardo's Last Supper using only laundry lint? She bought her towels according to the colours she needed. Yes, it's true, imagine. Aren't human beings spectacular?

Tomorrow evening, a potluck dinner here with friends, and then we'll all watch the latest PBS smash hit, "Downton Abbey," at 9. It's a delicious drama, a new kind of "Upstairs Downstairs" with the irreplaceable Maggie Smith making the most of every word. Who will top her from the episode a few weeks ago, where a modern young man who's to inherit the Abbey says he works (works?!) during the week but can maintain the Abbey on the weekend.

"The weekend?" drawled Maggie, in her role as the Dowager. "What is that?"

Mostly, I'm happy to report that I'm in love, deep deep deeply in love - with my manuscript. I hate to leave it and am anxious to return to it. As I write to you now, I am partly in my kitchen on a snowy evening in January 2011, watching my cat, as ever, sleep, and reporting to my friends that the little hawk I've been mentioning is in fact a full-sized sparrow hawk, anxious to dine at my bird-feeder full of sparrows.

But I am also in 1964, I am 13, passionately in love with a fab new singing group and longing to know what kissing is like. Not a bad place to be, on a snowy evening in January, 2011.