In the Bleak, Mild, Wild, Wet, and often Windy Midwinter.

                                                ALL PHOTOS CLICK FULL SCREEN.

We haven't had much snow this year in the current winter of 2024/2025. Just a couple of days of brief snow flurries, interspersed with a week of minus 7c to 12c overnighters, mainly ice and frost everywhere, then back to milder conditions for the rest of it.

This was a walk around Clydebank. Incidentally, this bandstand was used for a children's TV programme back in the day featuring Siouxsie and the Banshees, a Punk/Goth/ experimental outfit. ( This video can be viewed on dailymotion for anyone interested as I 'd just watched it prior to my visit after wondering beforehand.... has anyone famous ever played on/in it? Still a totally unique group, (at their best), no one else quite like them.... musically or visually, before or since.

Far less snow, so far, than past Scottish winters. Milder, thankfully, for those of us being very careful with energy bills.

But a lot of different winter conditions to experience and photograph. A misty evening here in late December.

For a walk along the canal from Anniesland to Clydebank.

Fairly eerie and gothic wandering through a deserted Knightwood Park at dusk, but a stillness I like. (At the moment, Friday 24th of Jan, outside my house, and across Scotland and Ireland in general, 80mph to 114mph winds are blasting through garden fences, destroying outdoor patios and ornamental furniture... toppling both young and mature trees across roads and onto parked cars in the sort of casual destruction that's fairly common for winter storms here now. 

It's the wildlife and anything left outside that suffer the most of course. Knightwood Pond from 2016. Loads of birds. I noticed this time around though this pond has sprung a leak and is a shadow of it's former glory. Only a few dozen forlorn gulls remain here today as the pond is 3/4 empty and easy for foxes or other predators to snatch unwary birds in only ankle deep water. With the current state of the UKs permanently potholed roads, overcrowded hospitals, full up prisons, and everything else in 3rd world level broken Britain I don't think repairing a leaking park pond in an outlying suburb will be high up the list of important things to do..... 

So views like this one ( it could be an unofficial wildlife reserve here, given the bird numbers each winter) is sadly an archive event.... until it is eventually repaired/ fixed.

All the fun of the fair... as a passing spectator to this annual occurrence.

In many ways 2016 seems like a very different world to 2025. Only nine years ago though.

Mist and silence is good for creating atmospheric photography on long walks.

I was particularly pleased with this one. Reminds me of old black and white British films of the notorious London fogs of yesteryear.

A frozen solid canal in December 2024.

Great Western Road at Knightswood Park.

Winter struggle in a rapidly freezing pond. Roughly half of all wildlife dies in severe or very unpredictable spring/summer/ winters. Mass flooding events, wildfires etc...

Tufted Ducks. Mild again in park pond a day later.

The shining path.

So all you can really predict, with any certainty, for the weather worldwide, in 2025....

 

is expect more.... of the unexpected...