Up and Not Quite Running
Posted by P S
07/01/2010
We are up – though not running. Walking a little gingerly, rather, on solid ice. It wasn’t like this yesterday. We worked from home – but found time to walk in the park, in six to eight inches of snow. Huge snowballs in a circle; snow sculptures, mainly of animals; snowmen. Most of this stuff was produced by adults, of course. The children, having no useful experience of making snowmen, ran around screaming, rolling, hurling snow and generally having a good time. Quite a few of the adults, though, concentrated fiercely on their snow-installations, a bit of Soviet realism, a good deal of Brancusi. People slid down hills on surfboards, tin trays, skis. I could recall an age in which nearly everybody seemed to have a sledge or a toboggan. It was, in many cases, a rite of passage, to cannibalise miscellaneous objects and fit them together to produce – hey presto, a sloboggan. But that was when snow came regularly and stayed for a while. Apparently, we normally – as in ‘lately’ – have mild winters because of air currents from the west; now they’re coming from the east because an area of high pressure has been sitting smugly over the western edge of the country, forming a barricade against the mild air currents, while simultaneously waving a warm welcome to freezing blasts from the Siberian wastes . . .
That can’t be right and, clearly, I should have been paying more attention. No area of high pressure has perched there in the past twenty years? That’s how long it’s been – or seems so – since we had snow like that, in our part of the country, anyway.
The pavements we walked on so carefully this morning have since been nicely polished by other careful walkers and are now lethal.
Still, it’s worse in China – and Poland – and (leave a space for a dozen other countries).
Besides, we can’t work from home every day, can we? Reading, drinking tea, popping out to walk on fresh snow amidst happy, laughing kids, running, falling, diving, throwing snow and shrieking?
What would the country come to?
What, indeed.