It’s not quite the same as seeing each other in person, but a friend and I ‘wave’ at each other via WhatsApp on the fourth day of every month.

It’s proved a pale but effective way of staying in touch despite geography and illness.

My friend is an artist, so her monthly greetings are often photos of her wondrously coloured creations. They’re amazing.

I’m not quite so artistically inclined, so I generally send her a photo of something I’ve seen on one of my many dog walks around Petersfield.

So she gets quite a lot of the Heath Pond, and the photo showed a sunset reflected in its calm waters.

Her response was: “just so serene”. I smiled.

One day a couple of weeks ago I did the usual walk, but it was later in the day than usual, so dusk was dimming a uniformly grey day.

I paused to look south across the pond to the rolling form of Butser. It was a study in monochrome.

Had it not been quite so cold I might have removed the gloves, opened my jacket and got the phone out to capture the scene on camera. I even had a caption for the image in my head – I would have called it ‘another sort of serenity’.

Given the cold and the rain – so fine it was the occasional so-light touch on cheek or nose – I felt the caption was surprising, but somehow right. It was serene.

Acceptance, courage and wisdom are the qualities asked for in the famous prayer.

Flaming sunset over the hills echoed in the waters of a lake; the waters answering grey with grey at the close of a clouded day.

Sunsets come and go, and some do so in full red and orange glory and some do so behind closed clouds. The likes of Butser and the hills do not change with the day-to-day, the weather passes over them and they remain.

The water rises and falls, is ruffled, calms, remains. The trees at waters’ edge green, gold and bare to the longer rhythms of light.

Today it is blue beneath blue, flecked with bobbing white gulls and cirrus waves. Our human fragility makes us prey to the cold and the damp, but serenity is within reach.