SLIP SLIDING AWAY..

As you can see from my photo, it`s been snowing all day here in deepest Kent and while I was out giving Barney his walkies this afternoon, somehow memories of winters past came flooding back.  It was, of course, 50 years ago that we had the great freeze of 1963, when the snow that fell on Boxing Day was still with us at the end of March.   Mrs. Snopper and I had been married for 18 months or so and we had moved into a quite nasty old house which we rented in a quite nasty bit of Maidstone.   During all that big freeze, our first son was `expected` but he had the good sense to stay in the warm and not emerge until the very last day of March, whereupon the snow and ice finally disappeared and we lived happily ever after.

But I also remember the big freeze of 1947, when as a boy of seven or eight, my family were still living in Hythe on the western shore of Southampton Water, where my Dad worked on the maintenance unit for BOAC flying boats.   I still have vivid memories of being pitchforked out of the house each day and told to get out there and enjoy the snow and don`t come home until tea time.  (That fairly accurately exemplifies my relationship with my parents.   They didn`t understand me;  they were Japanese.)  I remember playing snowball fights with my school friends up on the deserted golf course but strangely never once feeling the cold.   Our village school was never closed either and I can still recall a daily battle with small bottles of school milk that always had a couple of inches of ice on the top.

Now I don`t know when it was, but my Mother used to tell me about the time when her father, my grandfather, once went on a `works outing` from Swindon GWR Railway Works to the races at Newbury.   The day brought the worst snow seen for years and on the return journey, their charabanc (not sure they had coaches as such) got stuck in the snowdrifts near Aldbourne, high up on the Wiltshire Downs.   As you do, my grandfather and his chums proceeded to walk along the tops of the hedges all the way back to Swindon - a tramp of some 12 miles.

So today, with all its winter charm, is hopefully no more than a fleeting interlude before the thermometer climbs back into positive territory, because the older I get the more I can do without cold, snow and ice and the more I look forward to the return of the sun on my back and a summer to remember, rather than winters of discontent.