a photo I couldn't take

this morning saw a grey, damp mist settling over the roads and fields that lined my route to work - the kind of weather that makes you pull an extra jumper from the cupboard before leaving the house "just in case".

The final leg of my commute sees me driving through the suburbs of a small country town, where the speed's limited and sleeping policemen rudely punctuate the tarmac (helps jolt me awake if the coffee hasn't done the job)

on this particular drive, some odd combination of weather, light and time of day meant that at the exact moment of my passing a bus stop, another commuter waiting for his ride exhaled on his cigarette and sighed into the thick, grey air – and instead of dissipating into the atmosphere the breath of smoke hung in front of him like a tiny cloud, crystal-like and beautiful.

I couldn't take my eyes off the scene and kept my head locked on him and his companion cloud, so the upper-half of my body looked like a pirouetting ballet dancer in slow motion. In what cannot have been more than two seconds, this ran through my head: Did I have a camera? no. Should I stop? No. If I was a better photographer I'd have stopped. Yes. Why didn't I stop? I should stop. I'm going to stop.

With that final thought, I had to swing my head back round to the front to stop from crashing horribly, and the sudden movement broke whatever spell had been cast by the commuter and his cloud companion - I peeped at him in my rear view mirror before he slid out of sight as I turned off the main road into work. I sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking about the light and the smoker and how I should have stopped to take his picture.

then I came indoors, and wrote this.