Snow (Hey Oh)

With all this talk of global warming, I rather expected never to see snow again. Yesterday's impressive settling of snow took me right back to my childhood, back to when we used to get winters like this every year.

As a child, like so many things - whoopee cushions, Marmite sandwiches, dogs - I dreaded snow, for a multitude of pathetic little reasons. Notwithstanding being cold, which as a comparatively sickly child of poor constitution, I never particularly embraced, I detested being the favoured target among my school peers for getting pelted with snowballs; my principal reason for disliking the snow, however implausible and risible looking back, was having to trek to school in wellies, then changing out of them when I got there to leave you with wet socks all day. I was a funny child.

One fateful time, I pleaded with my mum not to make me wear the offensive black Dunlop plastic boots, and no doubt after a tearful standoff she allowed me to wear my normal shoes. If I recall correctly, it was the day of our school play and we'd just moved into the house my parents still live in, so it was 1984 and I was seven. Wearing shoes rather than boots meant that I couldn't go out to play at lunchtime - no bad thing, as it enabled me to dodge the aforementioned snowballs - and so I sat in a classroom with the other children who were either ill or who had likewise forgotten their wellies. One of these kids was called Adam, and he lived a short distance from the school in a road dominated by council houses and which was, for one reason or another, where many of the 'rough' kids lived. Leon, Michael, Tony, Shaun - all kids who routinely took it in terms to terrorise me throughout my school career - all lived in the same road. On this lunchtime, Adam, a small and insouciant boy, was being unusually nice to me.

I recall he said 'Oi, Smiffo,' for that was my nickname (occasionally altered to Wiffo depending on the individual). 'You like learning new words, don't you?' This rather casts me as a bit of a bookworm, but he wasn't far off the mark. I replied affirmatively, and he proceeded to spell out several words to add to my vocabulary, and which he advised me to go home and say to my dad. Which I did. I didn't know, until my dad quietly told me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to hear me use those words in front of him again, that I had sworn for the first time. None of this would have happened were it not for my aversion to snow.

One time at school, we small children were invited to participate in an odd ritual whereby the older children lined up against a brick wall, and us small children pelted them with snowballs. Perhaps this was an attempt to restore balance, or perhaps yet another excuse for the bigger kids to exact revenge on us, since they stood above us by about three feet in a walled flowerbed and were therefore able to bear down with a conveniently stored supply of snowballs. I remember being a useless shot when it came to snowballs, but one throw in particular was perfect and hit the brother of a friend squarely in the eye. I found out about three years later that he’d subsequently gone blind in that eye, and I have harboured a sense of responsibility ever since. Pesky snow.

Aside from everyone’s favourite reminiscence of the halcyon days of snow from our childhoods – being sent home from school because the pipes had frozen – I have few fond memories of snow, with the exception of one time while I was studying for my A levels. As a group, we were bussed out to the Warwickshire countryside to stay at an old manor house, receive presentations and undertake ‘team building’ exercises. I could think of nothing worse than this at the time, and when the snow started to come down I mistakenly thought that they would abandon the whole pointless exercise and send us home. Of course, for the rugged outdoor trainer types that enjoy sadistically watching from the sidelines as you fruitlessly try to get your entire team through the smallest hole in a fence while being bound together by rope, they just think it adds to the enjoyment of team building exercises. It doesn’t.

After a day of such activity, we had some dinner and then some leisure time. Quite what we would have done if it hadn’t been snowing, I don’t know as we were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Some bright spark decided to have a huge snowball fight, and once again I was reluctant to get involved. A girl that I had a huge crush on at the time insisted that I join in. I liked her so much that she could have asked me to do absolutely anything and I would have slavishly done it. It didn’t matter that she was the girlfriend of my best mate. It was a lot of fun, aided by what I felt to be a good deal of flirting by said female. The vision of her in the snow was, to a lovesick schoolboy, breathtaking, and perhaps compensated for the severe pelting I endured. I even named a song after that image of her in the snow. But hey, I probably shouldn’t dwell on this given that I’m now married, but at the time it was hugely significant.

In more recent times, the odd day of snow bothers me less and less as invariably it means I can get away with not taking the train to work, claiming the excuse of the trains not running because of the poor weather – no-one bothers checking, and besides, they’re probably all bunking off using the same excuse too. There’s nothing better than being in the warmth of your own home and enjoying how pretty snow can be, safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to go out in it. Sadly, in yesterday’s case, I was booked to deliver a presentation – a five-minute presentation; go figure – in Preston, which isn’t the warmth of my own home. It’s a two-hour train ride away.

Awaking to a perfect settling of three inches of snow, my first hope was ‘Virgin will have cancelled the trains to Preston’. My second hope was that the snow would have put off the guests at the presentation, thus causing the meeting to be cancelled. My third hope was that the fanbelt in my heap of a car would have snapped, thus preventing me from even reaching the station. But my hopes were dashed on all three counts, and instead I found myself slipping and sliding both in the car and on foot down to the station to get to the station; I even found myself, just 200 yards from the station asking a passing woman whether she’d come from the station to see if the trains were cancelled. Desperate, desperate, desperate.

It turned out that it wasn’t even snowing in Preston. I figure that the snow petered out on the fields by about Crewe, but prior to that the image of a snow-covered landscape as the train hurtled effortlessly through the Midlands was absolutely breathtaking. The sun was barely up and the snow was perfectly undisturbed, bar the tracks of some barely-visible sheep. It was a perfect, tranquil and calming, but the most profound aspect of it was the complete absence of colour. It was as if I had become completely colour blind overnight and all I could see was black and white. Far from being dull and grey, the monochrome vista was every bit as powerful as that vision of that girl I never stood a chance with all those years ago.

Coming home, once I got over the intrusion of a yellow number plate from a car in front of me which ruined the black and white movie I was thinking I was a part of, I saw some children sledging at our local park; driving onto our estate I saw that the population had been increased via some surreptitious snowmen standing guard like sentries outside houses and on pavements.

Between the wonder of the Christmas-card vision of a snowy landscape and the innocent, simple joy of children playing, I suddenly came to understand the wonder and excitement of what seems to be our most rare of weather events. I just hope that when Seren is old enough to get excited about snow we still get the occasional flurry and that we can build a snowman in our own garden. I might even let her pelt her old man with snowballs, just for old times’ sake.