Not Snow This Time

Yesterday evening the entire south west region of England disappeared under heaps and heaps of snow. Snow had been forecast, but not in the quantities nor at the speed that it arrived, and people were stranded, villages were cut off, twins were born in a fire engine with snow chains on, etc. It carried on all day today, too, and has now been followed by a bit of a freeze. Life is on hold again, and it's worse here now than it was in London last Monday...

...except that it isn't. The rain was coming from the south, see, and the cold air was coming from the north, and where they met there was chaos, everywhere except a very very narrow strip along the south coast of Devon and Cornwall and the shore of the Tamar in between where it never happened. When I went to bed last night it was raining. When I got up this morning it was raining. What snow (a fair bit) had fallen during the night was rapidly being washed away. There was enough left on Josie's windscreen for passing schoolchildren to have written a rude message on it, but my windscreen (nose in to the wall instead of nose out) was clear. All the talk in the yoga class was about who was snowed in and where (nearest less than eight miles away) while we looked out on a nice clear green football pitch and did extra breathing exercises.

Anyway, in Saltash it has actually been quite a nice day, albeit with a cold wind blowing. Ty found a rugby ball in the stream yesterday and insisted on having it kicked up and down the coombe for him. He stashed it on the way back, as he always does with the toys he finds in the woods, and went straight to it this morning to play with again. And again this afternoon. I've never kicked a rugby ball before - and I discovered that if you kick the sharp end by mistake it's actually quite painful, even with the heavy duty winter boots on. It's even more difficult for Ty to guess which way it's going to go than when I'm kicking a 'normal' ball, which is good, because it gives him more exercise. For some reason this ball, although obviously a child's toy, is made of much stronger stuff than the usual footballs he finds and shakes to death so that they are easier to carry, if harder to kick, so the dog is developing new techniques as well, pushing it down the hill with his nose instead of trying to pick it up in his teeth and throw it.

In my front garden this afternoon there was muscari in flower. In my back garden I think the young jasmine Marjorie gave me last summer, which was doing very well, appears to have shrivelled and died with all the cold weather. Primulas, campanulas, pansies and white periwinkle are in flower, daffodils are in bud. Spring will come, soon...