snow

It wasn't supposed to snow overnight.  Yesterday evening, as I was planning the week ahead, I warned the Systems Administrator that since overnight frost was forecast I might do a run to the dump first thing today, so if I'd disappeared when the SA got up, that was where I'd probably gone.  Instead, when I pulled up the bathroom blind to see how much frost there was on the lawn, I discovered it was covered with a thin layer of snow.  Reader, I cursed.

It is one of the signs of middle age.  I will still run if I'm in a hurry, or sit on the floor if there are no chairs, but I don't enjoy snow.  Particularly light dustings in North Essex.  Snow is ghastly stuff.  It breaks limbs off plants, squashes them out of shape, and kills or maims Southern hemisphere evergreens, that seem to detest snow sticking to their leaves.  It brings all useful work in the garden to a standstill, since you cannot do anything in snow.  You can't see the ground, or the weeds, can't see what you're treading on, can't see the shape of shrubs properly to prune them, can't do anything.  Melting snow is the wettest substance on the planet.  A centimetre thick layer of snow on an overcast, murky morning doesn't even have the saving grace of heart-stopping beauty, because it doesn't transform the landscape.

In places where it snows properly they must make themselves sick with laughter when they look at how we cope with it.  A trawl round the papers on-line while eating porridge showed that Stansted was shut.  Too snowy, you see.  They might have had as much as two centimetres further inland.  The A12 was shut by accidents close to where I work, another reason for customers who were thinking they might visit the plant centre to decide not to bother today.  There were traffic jams in Colchester, including near the main railway station, and reports of a bus sliding backwards into a parked car in Chelmsford.

I'd been thinking about going up to London at some stage, to catch various exhibitions.  There is Lely at the Courtauld, The Life and Death of Henry Stuart at the National Portrait Gallery, The Northern Renaissance at The Queen's Gallery, a small free exhibition about the family in art at Tate Britain, and a little display of recently acquired pictures at the Garden Museum.  Two or three of these would make up a very nice day out, and I'd like to get the Lely and Lost Prince in fairly soon, in case we do get real snow, since both close in mid-January.  And I could look at the Christmas lights and the window displays.  Heck, I could even do some shopping.

Trains from Colchester into London were still running normally, as far as I could tell from the internet, but experience teaches that going anywhere near Colchester railway station when it's snowing is a bad idea.  The station is reached via one of the most congested and potentially gridlocked roundabouts in Colchester, if not Essex, and the final approach route to the station car park, and two of the key roads off the roundabout, are quite steep.  In snow the whole area is a trap, one of those places where you could easily spend an hour or two not moving.  If, when you finally escaped, a bus had not yet slid into your car, you would count yourself lucky.  In the Systems Administrator's final years of commuting the SA took to travelling from Wivenhoe, despite the smaller number of trains and frequent need to change, after too many evenings when it took three quarters of an hour just to get out of the car park even when it wasn't snowing.  Anyway, I didn't trust the latest franchise holder not to screw the trains up at any minute, given a bit of snow as an excuse.

I did sort through and tidy up the piles of paper that had accumulated in the kitchen and on my desk like flotsam at the high water mark.  Garden magazines, begging letters from our former college and the SA's school, beekeeping magazines, little pieces of paper with notes of important things to do scribbled on them, clothing catalogues, gift catalogues, free fliers about kitchens and central heating, marketing literature from an American investment management group I don't much like, charity Christmas appeals, bank statements, dividend counterfoils and one ridiculous cheque for less than two pounds for a tiny shareholding acquired passively when it spun out of something else, old shopping lists, garden guides left over from our holiday awaiting filing since I always keep garden guides, a glossy guide to the Morpeth bagpipe museum, two copies of the Mercury's brochure because they did post me one after I'd picked one up in person, a postcard from my cousin, a pension scheme annual funding statement as required by statute, exhibition leaflets from my last couple of trips to London which I won't keep, notes for the music society marketing supper meeting, the report and accounts of a local horticultural society of which I am not a member, but they gave me a copy anyway when I spoke at their annual meeting and I kept it for future reference.  It shows how much they paid to have their silver trophies valued, something I am keen the beekeepers should do.

We accumulate a dreadful amount of paper, and that's after signing up to the direct marketing preference scheme.  Even when you opt out of receiving mail shots from new companies, that doesn't stop firms you've ever dealt with previously from sending you brochures, but just because I bought a pair of kilim covered pouffes two years ago doesn't mean I want to buy a furry hot water bottle cover or a scarf for £75 now.  I put aside the free magazine from Cheltenham Racecourse for the SA to have a look at, but that went straight in the bin.  I have to admit, though, that quite a lot of the paper was accounted for by things I had voluntarily picked up with my own hands, or even paid for.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator's tooth might be on the mend.  The SA was convinced it was a root canal problem, but the dentist thought it was probably just a lost filling.  The SA has a temporary filling, with an appointment to go back for a permanent one in two weeks, when the tooth has had time to settle down, or at once as an emergency if the toothache goes on getting worse.  Going outside in the cold aggravates things so that it is difficult to tell if it is getting worse or not, but on the basis that it didn't hurt at all first thing this morning when the SA woke up, I should say the dentist was right and a new filling might do the trick.  The SA is more hawkish, but the dentist did say the nerve could take a week to calm down.