Snow!

It’s four-thirty am… well ok, 4.44 am to be precise, and it is snowing in London. not the scattering of flakes we have occasionally seen in the past few years, but a proper snowfall, settling and deep enough to make footprints and snowangels.

My children are in the snow, rolling in it, throwing it and photographing it. I promised that if I should happen to awake and see it snowing, I would wake them, no matter the time of day or night. It has become such a novelty that they wanted to have the experience whenever it happened.

I remember winters where heavy snowfall was a feature at least three or four times a winter. I am even old enough to remember the deep winter of 1963, when I can remember walking with my grandmother and falling up to my neck in a ditch where the soft snow had drifted. There are slides of my walk with my grandmother, which show her in one of those little plastic rainhoods that people wore in the 1960s, and me sitting in the snow, grinning at the camera.

They’re making a snowman now. The last snowman I can remember us making was at least ten years ago, when my daughter was a toddler of two. We have two rather splendid sleighs, both wooden with metal runners, and for years the children would get them out and polish them each winter. After the first four or five years of forlornly setting then back in the garden shed, unused, they came not to believe in the snow, at rather the same rate they began to disbelieve Father Christmas.

Maybe I was mad to wake my daughter at 4.20am. It snowed a little a few weeks ago at a similarly uncivilised time of night, and I only allowed her to go out for ten minutes. She was so unhappy when the snow had gone again by the time she woke the next morning, she made me promise that if the opportunity arose again, no matter what the time of day or night, I would allow her to go out and “enjoy” the snow. On condition that they don’t wake our neighbours, I agreed.

I remember the thrill of being in fallen snow, the unfamiliar quality of deadened sounds, the way that it makes the familiar seem fresh and new. Watching them, I discover it anew for myself, as they experiment with throwing it, rolling it into a ball, making sculptures with it. Of course, the garden has gone from a magical kingdom with a white pristine diamond-encrusted blanket, to a churned up mess of soil and snow, but they’re experiencing it, first-hand. Both the joys and the frozen fingers and toes.

In the morning, while their peers will be trudging their way to school, they will either still be experiencing it, or in bed. They don’t go to school, but are home educated, something which is still strange in the UK and illegal in many places in Europe. Some day I plan a book on why I think that school is a temporary delusion which will be considered as brutal as sending children up chimneys, in the future. But for now, I watch my children delighting in the snow. And hope that they don’t annoy the neighbours too much.

Incidentally, go see the ProjectHamad page, and join if your conscience tells you to.

Update: we went for a walk at 5.30 am, and realised the snow was lying, two or three inches on the ground. We walked down into town and my son took the photograph in the picturesque old street in Uxbridge, Windsor Street.

Back for breakfast: my daughter is cooking pancakes as a treat. And still the snow is falling. The heaviest I remember for years in our area.