It started snowing again at about 6 o’clock yesterday evening. It hasn’t stopped yet. There’s almost a foot of snow here now, which is sufficiently rare in the South of England that everything’s ground to a halt.
We don’t have snow ploughs down here because we don’t usually have enough snow to need them, so most of the roads are inaccessible. The salt and grit that’s normally laid down only works on “certain kinds of snow” apparently – the kind where enough traffic can get through to melt it. Nobody has snow tyres, because we don’t usually have snow!
Paul very sweetly came out this morning and cleared a pathway down the garden to my Shed, and put the heater on, so I’m just trying to decide what work needs to be done today. My original plan was to take my sewing machine into town to be repaired, but there are no buses because of the snow. Paul’s working from home, so we’re both safe and warm, and very grateful for that.
Unfortunately we’re supposed to be going to a funeral tomorrow, a hundred and fifty miles away. The car’s broken (it decided at New Year that the alternator didn’t want to play any more), and it won’t be fixed in time, even if the roads were to become passable in the next day or two. We’d thought of getting a train, but they’re pretty unreliable at the moment because of the weather. Given that the snow’s forecast to continue for another two days at least, I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere.
Thanks to the miracles of modern technology I can at least stay in touch with my family, even if I can’t get to see them. (Although the land line’s broken too, but I think that’s the phone, not the snow.) We have mobile phones, we have email, and times like these would be a lot more difficult without them.