Weather

We have had the very first snowfall of the winter.

This made me feel uncomfortably glad that I was not working at HMP Slade and hence living in the camper van on an exposed stretch of North Cumbrian coast.

Being warm and dry with an enormous log fire is the best way to enjoy the snow.

All the same it was exciting. It drifted down in great white flakes against a steel grey sky, and obviously I hoped and hoped that it would get to about ten feet deep and the world would grind to a standstill, but unsurprisingly, it didn’t.

Not having terrible winter blizzard calamities is one of the sadder things about global warming. In the Olden Days,  the sort with sepia photographs, the lake used to freeze over, and everybody owned ice skates. Mark’s grandparents skated every winter, and in the library there is a picture of a carriage and four trotting briskly around the island in the middle.

Somehow snow always brings a holiday feeling with it, and it is especially exciting if you get the truly apocalyptic adventure of the electricity going off as well.

This is true for the first day and a half. To start with it is ace, all soft candle light and boiling the kettle on the log fire. It is romantic and earthy and atavistic until I need to use the microwave for something. After that I stop being an intrepid survivalist and start feeling aggrieved in a middle-class sort of way. 

Of course when we lived in France we managed without electricity for ages during some thrillingly spectacular winters, but to be honest most of our living conditions there were so primitive that it didn’t make that much difference really. 

I would like to add that if you live in a country where ten foot drifts really do happen, like France, it is not good planning to have an outside loo. I can promise you that when blizzards strike, it is truly horrible to have to crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and put on an overcoat and wellies, especially when you don’t wear pyjamas. 

Once thus inadequately attired, you would slip and stagger around to the back of the house, along the icy path in the pitch dark. If you accidentally brushed against the tree on the corner, it would send a rush of tiny icicles cascading down your neck. When you did make it to the dark silence of the loo there was often the added frisson of discovering piles of soft snowflakes heaped on both the seat and the loo roll. 

There was no light in there. You would not find out about these until you sat down.

Enormous spiders used to hide in there as well. Not many jobs are less desirable than reaching down a dry-hole toilet to try and catch the gargantuan eight-legged blood-sucking monster lurking in the dark. Mark used to do that one. 

Today we did not have ten foot drifts nor flesh-eating spiders, nor an apocalypse, and after a while it started to rain. 

I am in the taxi rank, and it is raining now, although there is still snow on the ground.

Mark says that more snow is forecast for next week. I hope he is right. 

The picture is Roger Poopy. It was taken on the dreadful day of the loss of his doghood. He was very unhappy at the time. You will be pleased to hear that he is almost fully recovered now. His interest in other people’s biscuits has returned, and he is charging about and weeing on things with every bit as much enthusiasm as he ever had.

I am relieved about that. It was awful when he seemed so broken.