Lost in snow

I woke up to 7.5″ of snow this morning. I opened the back door to let the poodles out and Day-z disappeared. She resurfaced covered in snow, looking a bit shocked. She then ran around like a lunatic. She normally does this in the morning but not with white stuff sticking to her fur. The snow didn’t stop falling all day but generally just a light dusting. The temperature didn’t rise above zero.

My first task for the day was to shovel out a path for the dogs to run up and down. While snow is obviously easy to dig, I can see why they use plastic shovels for it. It just sticks to metal. I also made some newspaper areas for bird feed, which meant we had most of the birds from Farnham Park feeding in our garden all day.

I couldn’t take the poodles for a walk. They wouldn’t have made it up the street, let alone into the park so, having dug the path, I wandered into Farnham at about 8:30 for supplies (and to have a sticky around). I say wandered but shuffled would be more accurate. The going was tough. A well trodden channel had been started in the centre of where the path normally was and it was generally an excellent idea to follow this. Treading either side could mean snow in the boots as you sank into the drift.

Waitrose was virtually empty – there were about three customers and five staff members – and I was in and out in about 10 minutes. Starbucks was closed so I was forced into Costa’s for my morning coffee. From my seat inside I watched the normally busy West Street. Traffic was minimal outside and the little there was, was moving very, very slowly. A steady stream of customers came and went, most of them explaining to their bosses why they couldn’t make it into work on their phones.

I wandered down to St Andrews for some photographs. The church always looks marvellous after a generous dusting of snow and William Cobbett’s tabletop tomb looked nice and cosy beneath it’s own white blanket. As he lived during the Little Ice Age, I’m sure he saw a lot more snow in Farnham than I’ll ever see.

Wandering back home, the park was alive with kids on sleds, or makeshift platforms of plastic and cardboard pretending to be sleds, squealing and shrieking with joy.

Standing in my back garden in the afternoon I could hear nothing except the delightful squeals of the children in the park, clearly still enjoying the snow, courtesy of the closed schools. According to Mirinda, if you stand in the back garden in the afternoon, all you can hear is the roar of the traffic from the A31. Well not today! I doubt there was much traffic anywhere in Surrey.

Tweetdeck was full of weather watch type tweets, with people posting pictures of snowmen, snowfall measurements and stranded Christmas trees. And there’s been an almost constant barrage of tweets about either having to go to work or having to stay at home. There has been a LOT of snow so I guess people would be more vocal than usual.

I called Mirinda at the flat and we discussed the logic of still going to Paris. Sadly the train tickets are non-refundable and non-exchangeable so, unless the train is cancelled (unlikely) we will lose the fares. We can cancel the hotel without a problem so we shall wait and see what tomorrow brings. In the meantime, spare a thought for the little chap below, caught mid rung as the snow fell today.

Santa gets caught without his reindeer