Snow, snow, quick, quick, snow

Funny. Watching all the news coverage on Television of the snow chaos, what strikes me is not that this is something new, but that its arrival is almost a relief. My childhood memories, even making what allowance I can for the lapses and illusions of memory, are that it was a time of clear seasons.

Winters were cold, icy and snowy. Like many folk I remember walking to school through snow deep enough to block roads and drift well over the tops of my wellingtons. Milk was delivered to schools in metal crates of small bottles, and day after day being 'milk monitor' meant gingerly carrying crates which stuck freezing to your hands, trying not to lose the bottle tops, for the cream on top of each bottle had frozen and pushed up the foil with a plug of (literally) iced cream ! They were incidentally the best to drink, and much prized.

But then those were pre 4x4 times, when walking to school was as normal as the ice and snow. A time before Health & Safety had taught folk to be afraid of daring to live and take responsibility for themselves. No, what has been odd in the years between, especially recent years, has been the absence of snow and ice; the unhappy blurring of seasons: a time when we have grown soft.

Years ago I recall the old lament in a country parish, that a 'green Winter meant a full Churchyard'. And so it did. For when old, we seem to survive dry cold conditions far better than we manage the damp, wet, cold that fosters bronchitis and pneumonia. And I are suspect that a real icy spell actually cleans the land of bugs. Yes. On balance, I confess myself happier with this kind of Winter, for all the difficulties we make for ourselves in it, than the more common recent ones, when I have seriously begun to wonder if my grandchildren would ever see snow. This kind of winter is not climate change at all - maybe it is an Epiphany return to normality.