Ah, snow. Don’t you just love it?

So we had snow. We don’t do this very often in the Southern half of Britain, let alone where I live so it is always the cause of much excitement and confusion. Me, I think it’s great to look at but here’s the rub, it’s cold stuff and even before someone shoved a yard of metal in my back I didn’t like the cold. Now I have my own personal inbuilt cooling rod, I like it even less – except through the window when it is very pretty and sometimes fun and always great to take pictures of (I shall stick some up for you in a few days…).

We haven’t had significant snow since we moved in here 6 years ago and they forecast that Thursday was to be the exception to that. They closed the schools in preparation – the news reporters all took up heir allotted posts at the areas worst (potential) accident black-spots and we all looked to the skies. Well, when the snow started falling you could just see the country’s weather forecasters all smiling glibly and patting each other on the back for having got it right (remembering at all times that this is the country where Michael Fish famously said that there was no hurricane on the way). In fact, they forecast that it would snow from the wee small hours until lunchtime and this is exactly what it did. Hardy souls like hubby went to work and the rest of us just decided to stay in and do things Friday instead as the forecast for then was for nothing more than a bit of rain….

So, Friday, hubby goes to work as normal and a bit later I looked out the window to find that it was snowing again – completely un-forecast! It looked bad too – I couldn’t see the hill behind the house but figured that it would all be over soon and pretty much ignored it. An hour or so later I looked out the front window to discover that the hill outside was covered in snow and was freezing fast. People had started sliding sideways down the hill and we were gathering casualties by the hour as they bounced from one pavement to another hitting cars and walls as they went. Some seemed to think the best thing to do was to accelerate all the way down the hill (presumably with their eyes closed) and others seemed to think that just locking up the wheels and wiggling the steering wheel from side to side (also presumably with their eyes closed ) was the way to go. My car was protected for several hours by someone who missed it by about 2 inches but then got stuck diagonally in the road just ensuring that everyone had to go round him (and me)! I have to say that I spent a large part of the day in the window holding my breath…..but thankfully my little car survived the afternoon - safe but a bit frightened!

Occasionally someone decided that they could make it up the hill (presumably because they thought that they were a superb driver whose Renault Clio has better traction than anybody else’s) and a lot of people had to swallow their pride and reverse (or at least slide) back down again. I saw one guy impressively sail up the hill in a Subaru Impreza – reckon he must have had spiked tyres he did so well, but apart from the odd Jeep or Landrover (who are obviously experts as they plainly do not buy these vehicles just to do the school run...) he was the only one who made it. Actually, that’s a fib – a Rover made it earlier in the day, but he hit 3 cars that I could see – an almost new Rover – not a nice way to treat it….

Anyway, for quite some time I was able to judge how deep the snow was (about 6”) by the pile on the top of my car until some ‘orrible little oik decided to scrape some off for snowballs – OK so it gave me a measure of how much had fallen in the two hours (about 2”) until another equally ‘orrible little oik decided to do it again. I bet they are exactly the kind of children who grow up to write their name in the snow too….My my, that makes me sound like a grumpy old git myself, but I really do like the pristine-ness (is there such a word?) of fresh snow.

So, the forecasters were wrong again and the country ground to a halt for another 24 hours. I was just grateful that it cleared enough for us to get away to PTV and HLW for the weekend – I was horribly afraid that they would be eating posh food without us and that we would have to have beans on toast or whatever I could dig out of the freezer as the news had reported that the shelves in Tesco were empty after panic buying! Winter eh? Two days of snow and the world goes mad….