Snow (at least for a while)

After much chatter in the media it finally snowed here on Friday. It wasn’t much to write home about – around 3 inches at most – despite snowing (lightly) for over 12 hours. Temperature wise it was just a few degrees above zero (Centigrade/Celsius) with a light breeze so, all in all, not too bad. I checked my local bus company website and everything looked OK so I went to work as expected. When I got there – without a single problem – I found that out of a team of ten I was one of three to make it in. But at least things were rather quiet and I got a lot done.

It doesn’t snow very often here so people do seem to get a bit overexcited when it does. Where I was born/lived most of my life (around 140 miles north as the crow flies) it snowed a LOT more so I’ve pretty hardened to it. In fact I remember when I was at college (doing my A levels – University entrance exams basically – for the third time) walking there in a blizzard and nearly deciding to curl up in the snow whilst the worst of it passed over. Luckily my survival instinct kicked in and I turned around and went home before my brain literally froze in my head. I learned later that around 50 miles south of there was the coldest temperature ever recorded in North Wales up to that point. I can well believe it!

Getting on a bit now I don’t like snow as much as I used to. These days I worry about falling badly on ice and breaking something important. Naturally as a child this was never a consideration and, as children do, I threw myself around in snow with complete abandon. Back in those days too I felt the cold a lot less and cared about being cold even less than that. But there are many things about snow that I still enjoy a great deal. Maybe not so weirdly (as it seems to be shared by a significant number of people I’ve spoken to) I love the sound of walking in snow – that almost compressed truncated crunching sound. It’s hard to describe but I think we all know it when we hear it. Then, of course, is the pleasure in making and throwing snowballs and making snowmen (can you still call them that?). So when I left the house on Friday to first thing I did was to scoop up a handful of snow to test it. It was GOOD snow. You could tell straight away that it had a good consistency. Not too dry and powdery (terrible for snowballs) and not too wet (although wet snow is GREAT for making slushbombs!). I actually envied my boss building a snowman with his little boy and his wife on Friday when he came home from school. The pictures on his phone made me smile a lot.

On my way home – after ignoring for most of the day advice to go home before it got worse -  I noticed what must have been 20-30 snowmen of various styles and sizes on my 30 minute return trip. A lot of people had been having a lot of fun out there. By Saturday it had all started to melt. I avoiding going out because the melting snow had frozen to a glass like consistency over the pavement (that’s sidewalk to my American readers) so I decided that discretion was the better part etc… By Sunday only patches remained and by today only dirty slush hidden in corners would alert you to the fact that we’d had snow at all. The forecast for the rest of the week is mild with regular light rain. So that might have been our first and last bout of snow. You never can quite know though. This is England and the weather here makes up its own rules. I’ve known snow in March and into April. Apparently snow has even been recorded in JUNE but I can’t quite believe that! But we’ll see. Maybe next time I’ll build my own snowman…..