Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

As you might have heard, it is snowing in England! We have had more snowfall in the last two days than London has seen for about 20 years! I certainly don't remember seeing anything like this for a good long time - if ever! Normally you get a few damp flakes that just don't settle, or do and almost immediately turn into annoying sludge. Not this time! We've had more than 15 cm of snowfall in London, and it only stopped actually snowing around 4pm this afternoon. Public transport was in complete meltdown - there were no train services into London, all the buses were suspended, which was amazing, and every single line on the tube was suspended or suffering from severe delays. Except, for once, the Victoria line! K decided to work at home today since he was supposed to be going for a meeting at the Tower of London, but all routes he would normally take to get there were not operating. I had no such excuse, though I had to wait a long while for a District line train at Victoria, and South Kensington station was closed due to staff shortages, so I had to walk through the sludge from Gloucester Road - and my feet were utterly soaking and freezing cold by the time I got to work!

I was expecting some visiting researchers from the Louvre who were flying in from Paris this morning - and though Radio 4 was full of reports of airports and runways closed, I had to proceed as if all was ok, and see if they turned up. Of course they didn't - all flights from Paris to London were cancelled all day today - but one half of the team travelled over on the Eurostar, and arrived without incident - early in fact! So it was a good job I was there, so they could proceed as planned with the samples of glaze and body fabric they had come to remove from a late 14th-/early 15th-century storage jar made in Islamic Spain, which are going to be analysed by thermoluminescence as part of a research project the Louvre are conducting on an object in their own collection. The analysis results will hopefully indicate place and date of manufacture, as well as tell us about the ingredients used in making the glaze. The XRF was going to happen tomorrow and this equipment was due to come over on the plane - it has been an utter nightmare to organise, and colleagues and I have been working on setting this up for over a month. And then, a little bit of snow, and all is cancelled. Sigh. At least I have an unexpected free day tomorrow - if I can get into work again! As our trusted Mayor said on BBC London news this evening, "It's the right kind of snow, just the wrong kind of quantity"!!

So, here is a little photo-diary of my journey to work in the snow today:







It was at this point that the batteries finally died on my camera, and I simultaneously dropped my lens cap to be irrevocably lost inside a flurry of snow. So that brought an end to my photography fun for the day. K went for a walk in Brockwell Park - perhaps trudge would be more apt - and took this photo on his iPhone:


There is something rather sepia and Victorian about it. He said some people were building an igloo!!! Even the youths from the local gangs were out building snowmen!

There's a wonderfully apposite article here about "London's day of innocence" - how the great smoke reverted to a giant playground for a day, as credit crunch blues were forgotten!

Other cities - Winnipeg, say, Moscow or Bergen - cope with snow, subdue it and go to work through impeccably gritted roads. London isn't like that: it rarely copes with anything; these days, it masters nothing. Equipped with a loveably tragi-comic public transport system, our capital fails on a daily basis. The poor suckers who live here get - at best - inured to this hopelessness. Yesterday London was so hobbled by the snow that the situation was even worse than hopeless: usually six million Londoners get to work by bus; yesterday there were no buses; the tube was even more spectacularly unreliable than usual... Just for a day Londoners got hit by something special.

And good old Guardian, always on the lookout for the nation's wellbeing - they printed these endlessly useful and delightfully practical instructions on "How to make the perfect snowball"!