The world is made of ice...

Yes, I know that this cold weather thing goes on and on and that my blog is turning into a cross between a weather report and a children’s adventure film by Disney - but the cold and snow remain a huge part of my life currently and in some ways it is wonderful. I haven’t had so much snow fun and games since I was a child and I still can’t quite believe the whiteness and beauty around me.

It isn’t all a ‘A Wonderful Life in Bedford Falls Winter Wonderland’ fun though.

I made it into work yesterday to find the office car park was closed and cordoned off by red and white striped tape. The trek from the Trafford Centre car park where the snow was piled deep (heaped four foot drifts requiring snow shoes - not that I had any) took me fifteen minutes to walk only a few hundred yards, sinking up to my knees in snow as I crossed... well I don’t really know what I was crossing I couldn’t really see for the snow.

The main roads had been generally fine driving in that morning, but by the time I left for home they had frozen, the traffic causing the snow-ploughed roadside banks to drift back onto the roads. I had an errand of mercy to perform (or should I say error) - getting provisions to my eighty year old, snowbound, mother-in-law – just the essentials, chocolate, lucozade, butter, cake, crumpets, magazines, cream, gin – the car park at the supermarket was an ice rink, cars were sliding everywhere. The two mile drive, at ten miles an hour, was ‘tricky’ and when I got there I had to leave the car at the bottom of the road and climb the hill to her house on foot because I couldn’t quite persuade my car to go up it. Best of all, when I got to her door she told me that she’d just run out of coffee and could I get her some - and then that bloody tree dropped snow all over me!

‘Drink tea.’ I said as I slipped my way back through the muddle of abandoned cars and back down the hill.

Last night the temperature dropped and dropped, and for the first time since I was a child we had ice INSIDE the house! The third floor windows iced up even with the central heating on, I wonder how cold the air outside was up there? This morning the temperature was minus eleven and it’s stayed there all day, and as I write this it is minus twelve.

Outside the world is made of ice. I wonder if this really is the shape of things to come?