Day Six - silver lining on snow clouds.

After the excitment of seeing actual people yesterday, and shops and everything I was on a high! I mean the town I went to had not one, but two greengrocers, and a Barnardos and a mad knitting shop. I went into all of them just because I could! Coming home later that night, pulling my groceries along on my toboggan with the loyal hound diving into the snow around me, I decided that I would make the most of this situation. That plan lasted all of ten minutes.

You can tell how bad it is by the fact that I am in the office on a Saturday when I don't have to be. This is entirely due to the fact that I am bored of being in the house, and I have been for three walks today just to pass the time and needed a newish horizon to make my return to the hovel more exciting.

I keep thinking the snow will go, but each morning I wake to find that yesterday's tracks and footprints have been eradicated in another snowfall and I am back to square one. I rescheduled last weeks meetings to next week and honestly, I'm not sure that I will be out by then.

By the time the snow does finally go I will have the tidiest house in Britain, the best organised office and the crazed look of Tom Hanks in Castaway. If I had a football I would instantly name it and start talking to it.

Watching the news / forecasts it is fascinating to see the presenters skate over (scuse the pun) the fact that every day they forecast more snow for North Wales. Because it is just 'small showers' then it doesn't count as anything much, but small showers (for which read several hours of snow) add up to multiple inches of snow on the ground and massive annoyance for me. But watching the news it is as if it is uninhabited up here and so snow falling in the mountains isn't relevant. Nothing like as relevant as a couple of days of inconvenience elsewhere in the country anyway. Currently we are getting the edge of the weather front that is in the South West, and the one travelling down the Irish Sea. This means I have had snow coming in from both ends of the valley. Sorry, enough of a whinge about national forecasting.

However there is an upside to the snow. The light. This time of year is normally so grey and drained of colour but the snow casts such wonderful light everywhere. Yesterday the hound and I went for a walk at 10 at night because the snow made it so light that you could see for miles. I guess that is my silver lining. Every snow cloud has one.

I'm escaping again...

In order to protect my dwindling sanity I am escaping. Just for the afternoon mind you but anything in order to see other people and remind myself that the world is still turning out there. I am donning my arctic gear and digging out the toboggan and then I'm heading down the mountain where a friend is going to come and pick me up and we will go and stare in shop windows with looks of astonishment on our faces. I will buy more junk food, and very little that is healthy and return to my mountain a new woman.....

Cabin Fever - HELP!

I'm getting cabin fever. Seriously.

It is now the fourth day of being stuck in the snow and at the rate the snow is still coming down there are at least another two days to go. I'm not totally snowbound. I can walk off the mountain (or, like yesterday toboggan down 400 feet (in altitude terms) of mountain at ridiculous speed, shrieking like a loon) and hitch a lift to pick up supplies. This means that I'm not reduced to eating my shoes or anything in a Stalingrad style. However the inability to be independent and choose when and where I go, and for how long, is astonishingly frustrating.

I have caught up on all my chores. I've finished my work, thought about doing the filing. I've painted the second coat of paint on the bathroom, and painted all the beams in the house so that they aren't all black and glowery but elegant and taupey instead. I've fed the birds and plucked the brace of pheasant I had. I've cleaned the kitchen floor and watched nearly everything on my sky + box. I've read a book of John Updike short stories and finished A Thousand Splendid Suns. The Loyal Hound and I have been tobogganing just for the hell of it, rather than for transport purposes. This afternoon I think I will throw everything out of my wardrobe that I keep pretending I will fit again and hide it all in the car which has currently turned into a snowy storage depot. I am soon going to be forced into writing my own great novella just to pass the time.

More importantly my secret stash of kit kats is running low and I may have to resort to making fudge to keep me going. In addition the Loyal Hound is addicted to the snow and spends the entire time nagging me to let him go outside and play in it, again.

I watch the news and see reporters across the country discussing in all seriousness the fact that 'it has stopped snowing here in outer Cambridgeshire' or 'there are at least 4 inches here in the local town and people are having to walk to the shops' and I wonder if they even know that there are those of us who are quietly going crackers with genuinely limited access to the rest of the world.

So, entertain me, amuse me, make me feel connected to the rest of the world. Please!

Snow days of yore (well, the seventies anyway)

Katyboo (hmm, not sure the link worked - look on the left hand side if it didn't) had some rather fabulous and fond memories of being a snow child of the seventies. I'm with her 100% on this and reading her entries has inspired me to pass some of my snowbound time with fond misty recollections of my own:

Being Snowed in: this had a nasty habit of happening the day after we were taken back to boarding school. Our parents would ring and tell us that several hundred feet of snow had fallen the moment they got home, and what a pity that we weren't there to enjoy it! One famous time though we had a houseful of people staying - 12 of us in all and we got snowed in, then the power cut out and we lost the hot water. We were there for four days living by candlelight, with the boys taking thermoses of hot water heated on the aga upstairs to shave. I can remember how strange it was to be woken in the dark morning by my father with a candle.

It is astonishing how much washing up there is to do when you have to heat all the water to do it in a kettle, and how often it has to be done with 12 people to feed. Eventually we tracked down some paper plates and resorted to those, burning them after eating. The nice thing about it was that we all ended up in the same room, writing letters, playing board games and playing cards. It was too cold to go off and sulk on your own and there werent' enough candles to light more than one room properly. Each night we took our own candlestick upstairs to bed. It's the closest I've ever been to being remotely like a Georgette Heyer character.

Tobogganing: I grew up in the mountains of Wales so hillsides weren't exactly in short supply. On snow days the four siblings, the parents and the inevitable pack of dogs (my parents have never had less than four) would pile along the track behind the house each dragging a toboggan. The road drops precipitously off into fields with a slope so steep it is hard to get onto the toboggan before it shoots off down the hill. The slope was long, incredibly fast and laced with frozen mole hills that could destroy a cocyx with one blow or send you flying through the air. As the bottom approached, you had to hurl yourself off the toboggan into the snow or hit the dry stone wall. Each time, the dogs would come pelting down beside you, occasionally one of them would throw themselves onto the toboggan with you, risking life and limb (ours) in the process. The long walk back up took five minutes and we spent our entire childhood trying to persuade my father to create some sort of a chairlift using the tractor from the farm. We told him that Hannibal from the A team would be able to do it, so why couldn't he?

Epic Journeys: I think my parents specialised in epic journeys. The one and only time I have been a bridesmaid was one such time. It was a January wedding and it snowed and snowed and snowed. The sheep were buried under drifts and had to be rescued and the half mile of drive leading to our house had disappeared entirely, becoming level with the hedges either side. I was to be a bridgesmaid to a girl who had been my mother's bridesmaid and the wedding was taking place relatively nearby - some 25 miles or so. To this day, I don't know why my parents were so determined that we were going to make it there but the decision was made.

I remember being dressed in an abandoned ski suit of my sister's. The bridesmaid dress was put in a bag and I was put with said bag in a toboggan then my father and mother set off down the drive pulling me along. I couldn't have walked if I had wanted to as the snow was so deep. I have such a clear memory of my father, who is 6'2", disappearing up to his shoulders in a drift at one point.

We walked nearly two miles to a farm near the A road. He lent us a landrover and we piled into this. The main roads were relatively clear, as I remember it, but the road up to the church and house was a steep single track lane that no gritter had seen for years. Ahead of us was a coal lorry. I have no idea how, but this coal lorry made it to the top, clearing a path for us to follow behind him.

I don't remember much of the wedding itself. I have a clear memory of being lent a cream shawl to wrap around myself because the church was so cold, and of eating eclairs under a billiard table in a vast and draughty house where the reception was held. My next memory is back in the Landrover. Dad had bought us fish and chips and we drove through a starlit and snowy world and watched a total eclipse of the moon.

I don't remember the toboggan journey back up the drive. I must have been asleep by then. I do know that most of the wedding party, including the bridge and groom, were unable to leave, and so the reception went on for three days!

Now, I must go and muffle myself up in my snow kit as I have to relive my youth and make my way through the dusk to the village where a friend is dropping off some stuff for me that I need. I wonder if he will bring fish and chips?