Fantastic! We've had proper snow! Snow that's stayed around for more than one afternoon. We haven't had snow like that for eighteen years!
The dog loved it - he bounded out into the garden last Monday and charged round in circles trying to eat it and play in it at the same time. The children loved it - it turned the world into a weird white alien landscape. And their school closed every day last week except Wednesday.
I've loved it! I've been for long walks with the dog across the local golf course - usually out of bounds to a bouncing hound who won't necessarily come back when I call him. I've been sledging with the children on school days because there has been no school. We've perched on the warm sofa looking out at huge snowflakes falling onto an already white world; and thrown soft powdery snowballs at each other in the garden.
My children have never seen so much snow. There hasn't been that much snow here for eighteen years. And there hasn't been real proper deep snow for thirty years.
We had two winters in a row in the seventies when we got snowed in for at least a week - really snowed in. I remember the snow was at least a couple of feet deep everywhere on the ground and there were drifts over six feet deep in places. We lived two miles down a rough track and very few cars came down the track at the best of times. But during those snowy weeks, not even the farm tractors drove past our house. The snow had been blown into drifts four feet deep along the stretch of track beyond our garden and nothing was going to get through without a snow plough.
I remember walking with my brothers through the woods on the hill above our house to the best sledging slope around and looking at the virgin snow on the field beyond the woods. The snow had a gleaming icy crust on top. We stepped onto it and the crust held our weight. We walked gingerly forward and still it held. Then suddenly my foot broke through the crust and the snow was up to my waist. It was incredibly difficult, then, to get back onto the crust and I flailed along until my brother hauled me out.
We had a carport with a roof made of corrugated plastic sheets on wooden beams - and the weight of snow made the roof collapse onto our two cars beneath. The neighbours came and helped my father dig them out.
We walked up the track to the Bridport road one day - a long walk across the fields. I loved the way the roads and paths were hidden beneath the blanket of snow. It felt liberating - we could walk where ever we liked without fear of treading on precious crops or disturbing livestock. The snow was so deep that barbed wire fences half as tall as 10-year-old me had become little chain fences that I could step over without breaking my stride.
The snow was even deeper around the main road up on the exposed ridge. There were cars that had been abandoned several days before still trapped there - some had bits of windscreen and roof showing; some were just mounds of snow on the road. The drifts were as tall as my father.
It was fantastic. And for me, it arrived when I was just the right age to enjoy it. Old enough to go trudging off through the snow with my two brothers and sledge down the steepest hill around and not mind getting wet and cold. Young enough to have no responsibility, no pressure at school, no reason not to want to be cut off from the world for a whole week during term time. Two weeks, two years, fantastic memories.
