Wonderful stuff, fog. Turns any setting into something atmospheric... Susan Hill, in the Woman in Black, uses it very well - the fog in which she immerses her streets is positively Dickensian. So how about a touch of the real thing: here's Dickens' own fog, from Bleak House, of course:
'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.'
Love all those verbs: rolls; creeping; hovering; drooping; pinching. Dickens was ever the master of repetition and listing, wasn't he? Love also the way he moves from long range to close up here, starting with the wider, river landscape and finishing with fog 'in the stem and bowl' of a pipe. And adding, for emotive effect with a touch of pathos, the 'shivering little 'prentice boy'.
Conan Doyle does a neat job with fog too in the Hound of the Baskervilles... but that's for another blog!
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