After waiting since I was seven years old, when the snow was up to my neck and we had to run home lest we be burried in the blizzard, we’ve finally had a proper winter day again, yay! Britain has been buckling under the strain of up to 150mm (6″ in old money) of snow falling in less than a day. I know, I know, it’s not a lot by many standards, and it’s not, but it’s enough to test the mettle of Blighty’s highways agencies. 
It was weird snow too, for a couple of reasons. First off, snow in central Scotland (well lowland Britain in general) is usually associated with a fairly swift warming of the air mass, so as it snows it rapidly turns from nice fluffy snow, to damp snow, to sleet and finally to rain. Today, though, the temperature stayed quite constant so it snowed and lay and didn’t melt. The other unusual thing was that it couldn’t make up its mind what sort of snow it was. Great big, lazy flakes sauntering down one minute then torrential hail the next.
Thanks to the propensity of the developed world to spend the last 200 years burning anything that doesn’t run away in time, we haven’t had much snow to speak of in lowland Scotland for quite some time. The memories of the seven year old are only partially tongue in cheek. I do remember being sent home from school with the snow coming up over the tops of my wellies.
Coming home through the town today, I’d been at a meeting at Edinburgh University, all the kids were heading out to go sledging, parents in tow. “Daddy, daddy, can we go sledging? Can we? Now? Can we go sledging? Pleeeeese!!! Daddy, it’s all white, can we go? Now?” Oh the joy of it all, and in only a year or three it will all be mine…