Backblog: The better part of valour is discretion.

From Shakespeare; Henry IV, Part One, spoken by Falstaff.

On the 6th of January I wrote this:

SNOW!!!

I at first thought this morning that I would walk to work. It had been snowing pretty much all night and was continuing to do so plentifully.

It took me just the six steps from my front door to the footpath to decide otherwise. It was manageable but probably would have taken me twice as long to do and a 90 minute walk is not something I wanted to do. I caught the bus instead

This is my front gate:


This my front door:


And this is a tree on the way down into town:


Weeeheeeheee!

This was my backyard three days later:


SNOW!!!

Plymothian Snow

It snowed this morning as I was walking to work. It snowed until about 9am, coating everything in a white brilliance... and then it rained. And unhappily, it didn't stop raining for long enough to dry out so now walking has become rather frighteningly interesting, and everyone is waddling. I almost fell over several times on the way home. A stiff-legged sliding gait is the order of the day. Very weird.

But back to the morning snow. It was amazing, not very heavy and it only managed to create a light coating before being rained on, but it was snow!

And I saw something I'd never seen before: Diamond snow!

You know snow is white of course - the frozen water reflects all light. Sometimes fluffy (this I have yet to see) and sometimes hard, it kind of floats down to the ground, slower than rain, and makes a shushing sound. Well it's ice of course, and in the right light, it sparkles. This morning walking along, when the car headlights caught it just right, it really looked like I was walking through a shower of silver glitter or a rain of tiny diamonds. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

Unfortunately, it was also Bloody Cold! I have just gone and bought myself enough thermal underwear to last the week out and a second hat, one with ear-flaps. Brrrr!

What The...?? Hang On!

Friday was the first day this year I'd been able to walk around comfortably in just a T-shirt. It was a lovely sunny day of about 18 Celsius. It would have been lovely to have spent the day in a park somewhere if I hadn't had to work.

Today... it is snowing. Snowing! I've had to bring out the winter hat, gloves and coat again, and it's bloody freezing! It's supposed to be Spring... you know, mild weather, bouncing lambs and flowers appearing. Instead, we have a covering of white stuff.

Mind you, it is pretty!

The Easter Bunny brought Snow!

Well, it was sort of snow.

Actually the weather couldn't seem to decide whether it wanted to be snowing or raining. Or indeed sleeting, although I have no idea how on earth they tell the difference between sleet and hail 'cause it looks the same to me.

Sleet is, according to the interweb, formed from frozen rain or re-frozen snow, so will not be as symmetrical as hail, whereas hail is formed in the clouds themselves and get its circular appearance from being tossed about up there. Also, sleet will bounce… but then I thought hail did too. It was quite a bit gentler than hail usually is. Walking outside – for some insane reason I wanted to be out in it – it didn’t hurt to get sleeted on. But it still looked like hail to me.

Rain here, well most of the time it isn't rain really, not as we know it in any rate. Rather than giving you a good drenching, it just gets you half-heartedly damp. For example I walked home the other day in London's version of rain; I was wearing sneakers that were most definitely not waterproof, but it took the entire walk - a walk of about 40 minutes - for my feet to feel like they were just possibly approaching a state of dampness. And the rain that wasn’t snow was London’s version of rain, so I didn’t get wet, just sort of dottedly damp.

It was fun to watch the big snowflakes swirling about though, and some of them were a lot bigger than I thought snow would be. It got really enthusiastic at times too, doing a real snowstorm impersonation, but for most of the weekend, it just sort of undecidedly mooched between snow, sleet and rain. Kinda miserable really, but lovely to be on the other side of the glass from.