Is there more to come?

What a gorgeous almost-spring-like day we’ve had in London today! And how completely different from the weather this time last week – when we were walking home from the deli in Clapham, where we had gone to stock up on cheeses (yum!), and the snow started blizzarding on us (and stupidly I had decided against bringing my woolly hat…)! The snow of not-quite a week ago is almost all gone now – the weather has been so cold that it took ages for it to start to melt, and then really only on the roads and busy streets, where there was car and foot traffic (and eventually buses again), but in the residential side streets, where apparently enough grit could not be spared to stop them icing over, the snow compacted under the trudge of commuters’ feet into a glacial layer of ice that creaked under your feet until you slipped off it. Our Tescos shop could not be delivered this week because of the snow, so we had to actually go to the supermarket on Wednesday night (something we try to avoid as much as possible!) and I ended up having to walk down the middle of the road to get there, stepping into empty car-parking spaces to avoid being run over by the cars creeping up behind me. The pavement was just too icy. It made me think of other countries which are actually used to snowfall where people unquestioningly do the public service of sweeping the snow off the pavement in front of their house. Someone told me something ridiculous – that people were actually being advised not to grit outside the front of their houses, because if someone were to slip anyway, they could sue you for not gritting enough! So you should just not grit at all! Can this really be true?? If so, what a disgustingly arse-about-face litigious Health-And-Safety-obsessed society we live in now!

Eventually on Thursday it started to rain a bit, and the ice and snow started to dissolve. It has not completely gone though – there are frequent mounds of compacted snow sprouting up from the grass, remnants of snow-people. A very enterprising person, or group of people (since the snowfall really seemed to pull people together in a 'spirit of the Blitz' kind of way, as I heard someone on the radio describe it) built a little snow-family on the communal lawn in between the two blocks of our flats, right where I pass in and out every day. It had a snow-mother, a snow-father and a snow-child, really well done, with clothes, and eyes, and red ribbon to make smiling faces! During the week, as they have melted, they have increasingly leaned in towards each other in a rather touching way, as if they were huddling together against the warmth. Today they are just three little different-sized mounds sprinkled with carrots. Whoever built them has obviously reclaimed the scarves and ear-muffs that originally decorated them.

I did notice that some daffodil shoots have started to appear, and some snowdrops are out. Seeing snowdrops always reminds me of the touching memory that my grandfather always picked my grandmother the first snowdrop of the spring. We planted some snowdrops on their grave when we buried my grandmother in December 2007, and when I saw the snowdrops on the lawn outside the Ritzy in Brixton, I wondered if they were growing down in Swansea. We’ll all be going down there on a family trip at the end of the month, so if they are growing, I hope they’ll still be out for us to see.

In honour of the almost-spring-like feeling of the world emerging from the snow, I bought some daffodils from the florist outside Brixton station. Daffodils are certainly one of my favourite flowers - they’re so bright and optimistic against the winter! They’re blooming nicely in the window of our sitting room. But is there more to come? The snow has gradually been moving across the rest of the UK, and heavy snow showers are apparently forecast for London again next Tuesday. It’s strange to think that while we’re in the grip of this ‘big freeze’, temperatures are soaring to inconceivable heights in Australia (47ºC!) and people are dying in forest fires. I am relieved to read on Bev and James’s blog that they’re ok, but it must feel far too close for comfort. And with such extreme weather conditions on either side of the world, how an anyone deny that global warming is a fact??

Right, that’s the week’s catharsis out of the way. Now to start thinking about the lecture I have to give in ten days’ time!