The joys of snow

Today is one of those days when the forecasts made by BBC Weather and my weather widget just don't match at all. The BBC predicts plain old grey cloud (and yes, there's plenty of that out there), while the widget predicts sleet. The five-day forecast is in a similar state of disagreement. The BBC claims it will start snowing on the same day as my widget says it will stop.

Regardless of what anyone predicts, I have only to look out the window to see that it's actually snowing. Again. Fat white flakes are all aflurry, lingering for a short while when they land on cars, and melting immediately on contact with the ground.

At first, walking outside this morning, I thought the flakes were my imagination. But by now, when they've expanded and increased their numbers drastically, I know that they're very real, and very definitely snow.

Back in December, I was desperate for snow, and jealous of people who had some before we did. But by New Year, driving in Scotland, I wished it would just go away. Every time I got in the car, I was certain that some vehicle or other was going to slide out of control, and we were all going to get smashed to a bloody pulp. And, indeed, there were a few scary moments when the car spun out (at very low speed) in a car park, slid, or got stuck. Even getting hit by a snowball while driving along in the dark was a scary experience.

Driving a car was only the beginning of the problems. Walking in the snow, even while wearing thick socks and thermal boot liners, was painful to my cold-sensitive Australian toes (weak! ahem, ahem). And as for pushing my daughter's buggy through the snow to nursery... well, I couldn't decide which was worse: getting bogged in fresh snow, or sliding all over the place on the compacted, icy stuff. On ice, just walking is perilous.

The consistency of snow also proved tricky for snowperson* building, though when, at last, Stacey the Snowlady was erected in the garden, she stayed with us for a couple of weeks. My daughter gazed sadly at her through the window, as she deteriorated day by day:

"Oh no, Mummy! Stacey's nose falled off! She lost her eye!"

Meanwhile, I was grateful that it was too cold for the rubbish to rot and stink, and too cold, it seemed, even for rats. There was no rubbish collected in our street for just over four weeks, and since many of my neighbours had missed that last collection, there was a lot of rubbish out there on the footpath.

I remember all too well how revolting it was when there was no rubbish collected from the suburb of Melbourne I used to live in. The whole place stank to high heaven. Rubbish spread, loose, over the footpaths and into the gutters. And I'm quite, quite certain that there was a greater than usual infestation of rodents and cockroaches (which is really saying something).

And so, perhaps I should stop complaining about the grey weather, and the cold, and even the snow, which is still a big novelty for me in any case. I should just buy a toboggan, maybe some huskies, and enjoy not being burnt to a crisp or eaten by rodents in my sleep#.

Notes:

* I'm not overly concerned about PC snow construction, no, but my daughter places great importance on the gender and characters of her snowmen, snowladies and snowgirls.

# A genuine possibility. Even very hungry mice (during a plague, say) will eat what they can of a person who doesn't kick them off after the first tentative bites during the night. And we all know that rats are worse than mice.