Chutes de neige

Well, it has started in France and the reporting just sounds more light hearted in French.

There is even a poem 'London Snow' by Robert Bridges.

Earlier I got some sand from the back of our garage and mixed it with salt in a bucket. Now I am all ready to sweep paths early tomorrow morning and to scatter the sand/salt on them.

Often updated snow forecasts - with visuals

I searched for ages on snow-forecast.com to find this page covering the south of the UK. I don't want to lose the link after all that effort.

If you haven't discovered the Twitter based uksnow then here it is: #uksnow

Happy page refreshing!

Snow!!! Well, waiting for it.

While I'm waiting, I found some lovely middle eastern snowmen from Al Jazeera.

I have just made some wintry tangerine marmalade for the first time. We have crumpets all ready for when it has cooled down.

All I need to do now is buy some anti-freeze windscreen wash and some food essentials I don't want to run out of over the next week. Ketchup and similar... Maybe even a trip to the wool shop so I can click my needles contentedly inbetween anxiously revising my Arabic before next Tuesday's class. I am procrastinating already, even though I know I will enjoy revising once I get started.

T has exams so that's the main event for a while around here. Plus the decorating in our piano room, which means most of the books need to be moved somewhere else and the piano wrapped in plastic.

Reinterpreting the crib

We have a stable with animals in it, plus an angel and our box of matches on the exterior stairs. The Holy family is outdoors to one side and the 3 kings are on their way to the other side. One king is permanently travelling on one knee. Christmas cards are all around them, including one with camels with tasselled hangings and another with symetrical, seen at dusk against a dark purple sky, palm trees.

To translate this into something T can accept I explained that it could be seen as a homage to the domesticated animals, newborns and travellers of that era and all eras: breathing, coughing, sneezing, chatting, yawning, exactly as we do now and exactly as they would have been doing then. All of them are divine, all special, all individual, all a little bit difficult to live with at times...

Maybe the ritual celebration of the birth of a child was merged with midwinter because both are stressful, yet also times out of time. Everything has to stop, we have to stay in one place and deal with each new thing which happens. When it snows here everything stops dead, we are freed from normal duties and new ones take over. We all chat to each other as we walk carefully in front of our houses and create little snowmen. Oooh, I so want it to snow!

I really want it to snow, yet am very grateful that it hasn't.

Tinsel

Now the snow has gone it is time for me to look appreciatively at our tinsel and all the other twinkly decorations. They won't be here for long now and we only do up the house once a year in such a special way.

Yuletide is still happening here, the surfaces are covered with presents and cards. So much is out of place. S has been on holiday from work for ages. The house has been full of coming and going. We got into synch with each other quickly. I think the snow arriving helped by cutting out external pressures and allowing us to attend to whatever we felt we wanted to do.

Because of the cold we really were in one room for lots of the time. Luckily M lives next door so T and H only have to walk through 2 door ways to visit and eat her sweets!

Sewing

I did some important and welcome sewing recently. Our family's fluffy socks had got holes in them. I used to throw away the holey ones, but this year there don't seem to be many fluffy socks in the shops.

So I had a think and cut out sole shapes from the really bad ones to put on the still ok ones. The chair beside the tv got all speckly with bits of thread and fluff where I was doing my sewing and weather watching. All in a good cause. 

Now we prefer the double soled ones to the thinner single layer ones.

As the weather has suddenly got so much warmer it isn't making much of a difference, but when it was -8 each night and the door opening is like opening a huge freezer door, it did make a difference.

Gordon Brown would be thrilled with the amount of draft proofing we have done over the past 10 days! Nothing like real snow and thick ice to get me sorting out the gaping drafts.

How not to do it

I made fudge today, but it didn't work at all. So there is learning how to do things and learning how *not* to do things.

Earlier in the day we sat round the table and played cards. We take turns being dealer. We play vingt et un without betting. We just count the number of tricks each player wins as we go through the pack each time.

I haven't been out in the car since Friday. S has been doing all the errands in the snow. This is the most non-adventurous I have ever been. T and H have been even more house bound in a good way than me. I rush out with my broom to sweep away new flecks of snow from my paths. Every envelope with a stamp on it is an excuse for me to walk carefully along our snowy footpaths to the post box.

The chat time in the kitchen is just starting between T and H. It's good that they have a similar chat cycle.

Snow times

I have been having a think about how it has been with all this snow since last Tuesday night. It's only been 9 days, yet feels like forever.

My conclusion is that it's the waiting which is so different from usual. I had been waiting for the snow to start, waiting for it to stop, waiting for the next weather forecast etc.

I have also felt surprised that the snow is still there each time I go outdoors. When we were inside I would forget that life has not been normal, then I would go down to the road and be amazed again at the expanse of perfect packed snow from invisible kerb to invisible kerb.

We forgot which day it was and had to check!

There was a lot of TV to watch and books to read. Once the decision had been made that there was no school or whatever, then the rest of the day was for keeping warm and feeding the birds. I kept on going out for walks round the village to post one letter at a time! Stuart kept on going for runs. T kept on going out to take photos and H kept busy indoors. We each have our own ways of dealing with it.

Will winters be like this from now on?

Snow field

Out

Bumping down the road

Bouncing

Before the snowball fight

How things change and the snow

The phone rang at lunch time. It was T on his mobile at school asking if it was ok to have tomorrow off as a fair amount of snow was predicted for Reading. I don't understand why I needed to give permission then or to him, but I did anyway. It took a while for me to hear what he wanted as he often calls from a corridor full of chatter.

My pathway down the drive is half done. I need 6 more sheet lengths to finish it. I scrabbled up some gravel to weigh down the cardboard/newspaper/plastic bags/bubble wrap and old sheet.

I used a broom to clear off the slippery slope where the drive joins the road. The latest batch of big, fluffy snow flakes has stopped so I'll nip out and do it again.

What is Christmas all about?

Now I have done Christmas and New Year with a birthday in between I have nearly forgotten all my deep thoughts.

The ones which remain are something like: the ultimate encounter group; the recurring challenge to react to the standard plan and choose what actually suits us in all ways; if I don't deal with a situation it will just pop up again until I do; when the children say they like or dislike something they really mean it and just following these simple requests is quite easy, much easier than not doing so!

I enjoyed the many quiet moments when I found myself clearing out cluttered corners of the house. I had not expected to feel like doing this at all. This led on to a time of not planning for 2010 at all, just staying in the here and now time of year with lots of TV and building fires.

The part I loved the best this year was the snow all around in the run up week. I didn't see any local snowmen, but my brother J sent me a picture of his own one in his front garden. He kept on surviving the night against all the odds.

Waiting for more snow

The forecast says we will have snow tonight. So today I will stock up on the food which gets eaten fastest in our house.

I had an idea about how to clear snow paths: lay down old cardboard in a line as it starts to snow, then pick it up once it has stopped. I can't see a problem with that. The gravel would be protected and then form a snow free path for us to walk along. I can't wait now!

I'll run this idea past the children to see what they think.

Advent Calendar 22 - Snow All Around

Mmm, it is just lovely in our village. I walked round in the evening so I could post some cards to my family.

The bend in the road by the Cross was covered in ice.The dog drinking bowl outside our pub was frozen over. Earlier in the day I did some stone bashing and boiling water tipping to break thick ice for the birds.

There is such a sense of peace and quiet. It is literally a silent night out there.

Obviously there is anxiety at the risks of falling over and of finding ourselves needing to drive and having problems, but for the moment we are stocked up with essentials and some very non-essential extras!!