Walking in the air or dancing on the snow, it waltzing in wonderland for so many children when the heavens give their gift of so many varieties of soft, sensuous snow. We are all children as its winter scene opens new literary landscapes of delight.


I made yet another blunder on Monday, when someone phoned me up at 6 pm asking if the Organic Gardening meeting on Local Literary Landscapes was still happening. Yes of course it is, surely an inch or two of snow won’t stop buses travelling across the town to St Peter’s Church and the Phoenix?


Well at 6-45 pm I felt so embarrassed as I reached the bus stop to find that all buses across the city had been stopped, not just those struggling up the icy, snow blasted hills. Geoff Mead could have course talked about literary classics like Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs, or the Snow Queen, focusing on the story of “the Flower garden of the woman who knew magic”.


Although country flower gardens are often magical, the last month of cold, bitterly cold, and now snowy cold weather, demands that we will all need to be magicians in the garden , with a tot from the old brewery or even a phoenix in flames, to warm the body and soil. Seeds that have been sown will rot and die, my chitting potatoes have black eyes and any half hardies are half dead; my  Echium virescens , a Tower of Jewels, will not be a honey pot for my sunbathing bees at sunrise, as together they will not be warmed by the early morning rays.


Geoff Mead might have reflected on John Ruskin’s remark that there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of weather, which of course all gardeners know. In Swedish there is the rhyming proverb   “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing,”  while the murderous  and mysterious “Ms Smilla’s feeling for snow might” also have featured in the talk. Ms Smilla and the migrant Greenlanders, lost in the barren, isolated, wastes of Copenhagen recalls with affection the  49 different words for snow.


Having travelled many time in Nordic countries, where airports are open during blizzards, where it frequently falls to -20c, where my moustache was heavy with frost, buses run all the time on time. I do not want to be a curmudgeon, but was it really necessary to cancel all buses and miss the ever warming Geoff Mead? 


How lovely it is for children to enjoy the snow, an education in life, fun with the new sounds and sensuality, while discovering the power and the beauty of nature.  Soon the snow will have melted and, with Comic Relief coming, Dads can practice their slow, slow, quick, quick, slow and have their families in tears- partners with trodden toes and children collapsing in laughter.
Snow, snow.. quick quick.. enjoy the snow.

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