It was chilly this morning. Probably the coldest it's been since First Lockdown kicked off in March. So I went out for my morning walk with full cold weather gear: big coat, fur hat, gloves.

Normally, in those clothes, I just have to put up with my actual face still feeling chilly, and rely on blood circulation from the warmer parts to keep it manageable. But not this year! A Covid face mask will be just the thing to keep even my face warm, I thought. And it did: the air around my nose and mouth was at a lovely temperature. A little humid, but not uncomfortably so.

But what I wasn't expecting was that my moisture-laden breath, mostly expelled upward and downward because of the mask in the way, would graze lightly across my eyelashes on its way out and – since they are of course not under the face mask and hence much colder than my breath – promptly condense all its moisture again in the form of dew.

That was a very strange sensation! I'm used to my eyes themselves watering from time to time, for all the usual reasons human eyes do that. But water getting in my eyes whose source is the tips of my eyelashes feels very different, and I haven't quite got the hang of how to blink it away effectively yet.

(Also, being slow and snoozy and early-Monday-morning, it took me ten minutes to even work out what was going on. Ahem.)