Mist opportunity

The chill continues. From the moment I woke up, freezing fog has completely covered the part of the city where I live and work. The sun almost broke through at lunchtime, but was fighting a losing battle and had more or less given up by 3pm.

I haven't known a day like it in Liverpool for years. From everywhere being vividly etched in sparkling frost just 24 hours ago, now I can barely see a couple of metres in front of my face. A different kind of silence is abroad: not a respectful, sympathetic one, but a threatening, shifty shroud of nothingness. This isn't the sort of weather to linger and savour. It's the kind to shut out behind locked doors.

The mist and fog is forecast to hang around for at least another day or so, the cold snap even longer - a prediction born out by the fact that the price of domestic gas in the UK has doubled over the last seven days. Meanwhile in the Coastal Observatory on Hilbre Island in Liverpool Bay, a webcam continues to chart our spectacular slide into the kind of winter not seen in Britain for a quarter of a century.