I wish it would snow properly.

I know it is a pain in the backside for me as well as everyone else who does not want school to be cancelled (more on that later) but I do miss a bit of winter. What we have this year, at least down here in South East England is more like March than January. On Friday I was running in shorts and T shirt and feeling warm; that’s just absurd for this time of the year. Even this weekend, up in the North East to celebrate my Dad’s birthday, it was windy but warm. This is in County Durham for goodness sake. Thank goodness that the region of my birth did finally decide to treat me to a specially arranged short wintry shower while I was out and about and tried to blow me back into New Year with some gale force winds, but I am not placated that easily. My childhood was full of huge snow drifts and ice inches thick on the top of stone walls, deposited day after day of unrelenting Siberian conditions. Hiding in my parka and mittens in a futile attempt to keep the cold out as I slithered across the cobbles of the old CO-OP yard – long since gone, sadly, a really old style little shop with a courtyard you walked through, which included stables for the horses that used to pull the delivery van. It sounds Victorian (and the building was) but it was still functioning that way in the late seventies. Needless to say they pulled it down in the 80s to build some bland housing, but moaning about the destruction of my childhood can wait for another week.

I really would like some snow now. Just a few days, so I can be reassured that at least some of the bugs will be killed off and to put a stop on the numerous plants in the garden that are starting to think it is time to come up and bud, about two months too early. There are other benefits too, such as the hilarity of watching people off to the station in wonderfully inappropriate footwear for one, the inability of most people (myself included) to drive in snow as well, thankfully not as dangerous as it could be here because most people cannot get out of their drives.

Ah. But the struggle to work, you say. To school, plans put on hold as you cannot get to where you need to be. Surely hoping for a blanketing of snow is selfish? I suppose it is. But we need reminding sometimes that not everything goes our way all the time. It might help us react better when things really are out of our control. I have been in enough M25 jams over the years to get some feel for when you are going to be late/miss something and there is nothing you can do about it, but it does not stop me raging at the universe. Although the lovely Wife and I have been very lucky on this, best epitomised by the winter Saturday evening out in London where we decided that we wanted to go home early after a long but lovely day. In London it was cold but free of snow, so we were a bit surprised to see the couple of inches on the platform at West Hampstead. As the train went north, the number of inches seemed to grow with each station until there was a really substantial fall at St Albans; we tromped happily through the snow home, but I was a little chastened to find out later that this was the last train that made it that far that evening.

I am going to put it down as payback for all those winter mornings as a child and teenager, sitting next to the long brown oblong cabinet that was my parent’s Radiogram listening to the local radio and praying that my school would be among the list of those closed because of bad weather. But it never was. Sometimes I swear that mine was the only school that didn’t close some years, that there was some kind of bet going on between headmasters in the context of which we were mere pawns. So if I’ve been lucky with snow since then maybe it some kind of catch up for all the days I missed sledging and making snowmen.

But I would like it to snow. Just a wee flurry, a light dusting, as a tiny reminder of the fact we are supposed to have seasons.