Maybe a snow day, maybe not

Braced for the great snowstorm of 2018 here in the UK – billed in the media as the ‘beast from the east’ – my wife’s shopped for the impending snowcalypse, along with everyone else in the area who have faith in the weather forecast. Excellent business for supermarkets as the shelves are emptied of bread, milk, alcoholic beverages…

weather

Will we be waking up to a snow-covered landscape Tuesday morning? Will there be traffic chaos, cancelled buses and trains, school closures? Perhaps in some parts of the country. But I think we’ll get a few snowflakes drifting about here, barely leaving a covering on the grass.

I grew up in southern Ontario, Canada. I don’t recall ever missing school because of snow. Then I took a job in a town in northern British Columbia. I was advised to invest in long underwear as soon as I arrived in October. And to buy cross-country skis as soon as I could. Temperatures regularly plummeted to -30F (this is where I learned that -40 is the same in either Fahrenheit or Celsius). No one ever missed work because of snowstorms or freezing cold temperatures though.

The last time we had significant snowfall here was in December 2009, lasting well into January 2010.

Anne_snowpeople

Pictured here: My wife with two snowpeople we created on Christmas Day, 2009 – staying at a hotel on Lake Windermere – the lake completely obliterated from view in the background.

Above: At home in January 2010, looking across the valley from the high school playing fields. The school was closed for an extra two weeks after the Christmas holidays that year.

So although I wouldn’t wish the disruption to everyone’s lives that a massive snowfall can bring, I’m sort of hoping for something big from the ‘beast from the east’. I would like to make a snowperson in my garden. Even if it only has a short life, like this snowthing I managed in January 2015, melting rapidly the day after its creation.

snowthing2