Feeling for Snow

It's been snowing in London. It's been bitterly cold with it. I've been lucky, in some respects, because a dose of the flu has kept me at home - although L believes that I shouldn't have stayed home when my sinuses felt like golf balls were lodged underneath my eyes, but should rather have gone to work and saved my sick leave for something more serious; I'm guessing she expects me to have an accident bad enough to require amputation one of these days. But it has meant that I haven't been forced to venture out since the snow started falling, which in my world can only be a good thing. I'm well enough this morning to have to go out though, and I'm not looking forward to it. Because last night, listening to the cars on the street skidding into each other at low speeds - or in the case of one unfortunate ambulance, higher speeds, it occurred to me that there are things you don't know about snow if your only contact with it while you're growing up comes through the television. So here is my later life list of lessons about snow.

First up, while it's falling, it's basically rain. In movies, it always looks so pretty, giving everything a nice white dusting. And when you're watching it falling through a window, the prettiness holds. When you're caught out in it without an umbrella, on the other hand, you will come in looking like a drowned rat. Just a little colder than the usual and in some cases, a drowned rat with dandruff until the flakes finish melting.

Snow makes sounds while it's falling, but also somehow seems to deaden some sounds at the same time as it makes others travel further. The soft rushing noise of it's falling always alerts me to the need to look out the window. If it's falling to softly for the noise to reach me, the absence of other sounds at home let me know that there's something going on. The traffic noise seems to disappear into the mush. But at work, it's the ability to hear the bells of the church near the tube. On normal days, they can't be heard over the noise of traffic. On snow days, it's like being next door to the steeple.

Walking through fresh snow also makes a lovely crunching noise as your boots break the surface tension. It's a crisp sound, lovely to hear the first time, until you realise that everybody who's out to make that sound is really just compressing the snow. It's then that you learn that your life in a sunny climate has in no way equipped you for life in a cold one. You can't skate, you can't ski, and you damned sure can't walk on the skating rink that snowy footpaths become as more and more people flatten the snow into ice. Because crushed snow, the kind that you find on footpaths, for example, is not the pretty crunchy stuff that fresh snow is. It is hard packed ice that the inexperienced have to shuffle along, like the cars on the road with wheels spinning but no traction. Until the men with their shovels and grit make it to work and start clearing safe pathways, footpaths become dangerous territory. And there's no escape.

For all that, though, it is really beautiful. The novelty of seeing London covered in a soft snowy blanket makes up for the days of stomach clenching misery that follow as I negotiate my way to work.

Ooh, work...damn, late again. Oh well. The other thing about snow: it makes a convenient excuse for tardiness.