3.00, Friday 10 March 2023
It has snowed.
It
wasn’t exactly a surprise as the weather reports had forecast it, but I tend to
view weather forecasters as being hyper-vigilant easily-excitable
gloom-mongers. They’re always predicting massively disruptive weather which turns
out to be extremely disappointing in reality [an example of hyperbole followed
by litotes, if any of my English students are reading].
‘FLASH
FLOODING EXPECTED THROUGHOUT THE NORTH-EAST!’ turns out to be a slightly
faster-than-usual beck in Huddersfield. ‘TSUNAMI HEADING FOR FILEY: RESIDENTS
TOLD TO BE PREPARED!’ eventually arrives as a pleasant curler that splashes the
promenade and wets a few joggers wearing cagoules.
Even
weather-related events that have already happened are reported in such sensational
language that it’s difficult to get them into perspective. ‘EARTHQUAKE DESTROYS
HOUSES IN BIRMINGHAM’ turns out to mean that a few roof-tiles were dislodged;
‘FREAK HURRICANE BLASTS PICTURESQUE VILLAGE’ is accompanied by a photo of a
village green dotted with a snapped-off branches and the pub-sign bent awry.
Obviously,
sometimes we do get genuinely serious weather-related disasters in the British
Isles. I’m old enough to remember the infamous 1980s hurricane (recreated so
effectively in the climax of A.S.Byatt’s novel Possession), and the
second one that happened a year or so later. I was at teacher-training college in
Greater Manchester, and newly-in-love, so I spent the night wide awake in the
arms of my boyfriend, occasionally wondering what the hell was causing all that
noise outside (oh, how I miss the era known as ‘back in the day’!). At that
time, student accommodation wasn’t what it is today (no modern university
student would stand for the conditions students used to accept as normal). We
lived on the top floor of an old block of damp council flats perched on top of
a steep hill, and the hurricane’s fingers rattled the single-glazed windowpanes,
sneaking round the gappy edges so the notoriously chilly flats were cold enough
to cause frost-bite. Great howls and creaks could be heard, along with the
occasional bang as flying wreckage hit the building or bounced off cars. It
felt as if we were in a storm at sea.
I
remember at one point my boyfriend said, in another example of litotes: ‘Sounds
a bit blowy out there’.
On
that occasion, the storm provided a suitable background for our torrid
emotions. [An example of The Pathetic Fallacy, for any student reading this].A friend and I had planned to go home to my mum’s house for the
weekend, the next morning, and I remember walking to the railway station,
feeling dazed through lack of sleep, in a weird silence, the sky lit by a
silvery-grey light and the streets strewn with debris like the aftermath of a
riot.
However, despite these occasional flurries of exciting weather-related drama – the winds that force people to walk home more or less horizontally, fighting all the way; the floods that lead to Instagram shots of Volvos floating down high streets and old ladies in rain hoods being helped into dinghies; people huddled like refugees in cars topped with two feet of snow on the M25 – we’re not really a country of extreme weather. We don’t suffer volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hail-stones as big as a fist, permafrost.
Not yet anyway. Who knows
what Global Warming will do to our generally sedate climate.
What
we do get is a bit of snow now and then. Like yesterday. It fell steadily,
feathery and picturesque, coating the grass and rooftops like royal icing on a
cake, but leaving the roads and pavements relatively clear. The worst that
happened in our household was that our elderly cat refused to go out to pee. We
had to gently force her through the patio doors when the snow abated a little,
and she then huddled miserably under the garden table staring at the lawn in
terror until we let her in again. As far as I knew, unless she had done the job very
quickly when we weren’t looking, she hadn’t emptied her digestive system since
7.00 am. Personally, I need to pee about every thirty minutes
these days, so I don’t know how she does it!
Interestingly, it snowed more heavily overnight and today our part of the world is coated in beautiful snow and the sky is that gorgeous bright blue you get after a snow-storm. P has gone out for a walk and is probably lying in a snow-filled ditch as I type (last time he went for a walk alone he ended up caught in the vicious embrace of a bramble bush after falling over a stile). The cat went out quite happily an hour ago – it is obviously the actual precipitation she hates – but I’m slightly concerned about where she’s gone. She’s probably paying her previous owners a visit, on the basis that we have fallen short of her expectations by not only failing to stop the snow but also pushing her out into the garden several times against her will. Or she’s also lost in a snow drift.
Of
course, when it does snow, all the anecdotes about previous snowfalls emerge
from your memory. Like the time when my niece and her partner came to our house with
their baby and my mum, one evening round Christmas, and by the time they were
ready to leave the ground was thick with snow and the roads ungritted. It was
impossible to drive in. My niece tried but the car spun in the road
uncontrollably. So they were forced to stay at ours, but my niece and her
partner decided to walk back to their house, a couple of miles away but up a
steep hill, to get their baby’s travel cot. It took them a long time, but they
eventually got back with a bag of stuff they needed and a large ungainly box
containing the dismantled travel-cot, which my niece had carried through the
snow all the way down the hill to our house, slipping and sliding all the way.
She was utterly exhausted, freezing, soaking wet and pissed-off. And it didn’t
improve her mood when she opened the box to discover it was empty! We never
found out what happened to the travel cot.
My own
personal memory of that night, however, is of sitting on my sofa cuddling my
great-nephew, who was about eight months old and was still awake, with the
light turned low so we could see the twinkling Christmas fairy-lights, and the
snow falling in the garden outside the patio doors, singing to him, while he
stared wide-eyed at everything. It is a memory I will always cherish.
For
every awful snow-related memory there is another wonderful one.
Today’s
snow has scuppered our plans for today, though. We were going to take my mum
out for an afternoon tea as a birthday treat. The place we’d booked is a nice
little tea-room in the middle of the Loxley Valley on the edge of Sheffield,
and unfortunately it has had to close today due to the snow. This is
particularly irritating as this is the FOURTH time we have booked a table at
this particular café in order to take my mum for an afternoon tea, but we have
yet to actually get her there. The last three times we had to cancel ourselves (Philip
got Covid, mum had a tummy upset, mum was at my niece’s house as she’d
forgotten we were going out for afternoon tea). On the third occasion, P booked
the table but forgot to tell them we wanted afternoon tea, so it was just as
well Mum couldn’t make it as she would have been deeply disappointed – she has
an incredibly sweet tooth and loves a plateful of cakes, and she particularly
loves taking home the leftovers in a box so she can indulge herself for the
next couple of days. This works well as I’m pre-diabetic so shouldn’t really
eat cakes, and there is a definite limit to P’s pleasure in eating such things,
so mum ends up with most of our share too. Anyway, not today. Maybe there's something eldritch in the Loxley Valley that is refusing to allow my mother to enter its domain, some unseen presence in Oughtibridge silently shouting 'Thou shalt not pass, Woman!'. Or maybe it's just coincidence.
The
cat has just returned, in case you were worrying. She was desperately hungry
after her adventure, and - after eating a packet of cat-food and sitting on a towel looking doleful - she has now gone upstairs, presumably to go to sleep on
our bed…
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