Frozen sandwich…

Here we go: ‘What will I blog about today?’, the first thing I thought when I looked out at the gently falling snow at six o'clock this morning.

Well the sun is shining now and, despite the unreasonable and unseasonable cold weather, that has to be a good thing.

They say this cold spell is going to last well into April, perhaps we’ll go from Winter to Autumn without anything in between. Either way we’re probably in for a shorter spring and summer – well, you can’t cram a quart into a pint pot and all that.

Apparently it’s all down to the Jet Stream, the Gulf Stream, climate change and Paddy McGinty’s goat. Well maybe not the goat but certainly the other three. Given how far north were are we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s cold, this is pretty much how it should be, but of course we’ve been spoilt by good fortune and Mother Nature who have tended to ignore our geography..

I wonder if there will even be a spring this year, perhaps we’ve seen the last spring we will ever see. What if that really happened? What if there was no spring or summer this year, no chance to get the crops into the ground? They say that the seasons are changing, but what if it isn’t change, a few weeks shift in the regular pattern, what if it is disappearance?

Is this how ice ages start? Later and shorter springs and summers, no autumn because no leaves have formed to fall, and then winter. Did year-round winter creep up gradually or did it appear over a just a few years? Fifty million years ago Antarctica had a temperate climate, evergreen forests and many more kinds of animals than it has today. As the icecap slowly formed, most of the animals that lived there in ancient times were obliterated. The evidence for this once warm climate is in the fossils of plants, including fossil ferns, found by scientists.

But what about the sandwich?

My daughter rushed into the kitchen this morning asking if she had a sandwich for lunch. Of course I had no idea and she stormed around declaring that she hadn’t time to make one. In the time that she spent moaning, and doing her hair, and throwing some books (probably the wrong ones) into her bag I’d made her a chicken salad sandwich, bagged it, and passed it to her.

I won’t be able to do that when the ice age gets here. They’ll be no bread, lettuce, or chicken.