Snow Day

The most snow we've had in 18 years apparently. The south east of England is currently being hit by snow - the trains were cancelled, buses stopped in London and the major, Boris Johnson cancelled the congestion charge for the day.
My kids stayed home and we had a snow day - I had to cancel my class this afternoon because the weather was closing in again, in fact it's snowing now as I write this. We went walking with P in the woods and it looked like Narnia. I love the way the entire countryside becomes silent when it snows as if it's taking a pause, waiting for something to happen.
That's how today has felt - like a pause in between the weekend and the week proper starting. Certainly my week now feels fractured - I didn't teach my class, a meal we had planned with friends in London tomorrow night looks very doubtful, my yoga class was cancelled and my pilates class tomorrow is not looking good.

With a mention of both yoga and pilates I do realise that sounds as if I've somehow become a WAG (a footballers' Wives And Girlfriends - you know the type - they look very groomed and have perfect figures, perma-tan, plenty of bling but often no brain) but after a mountain bike accident back in June 2008 and a couple of climbing falls in September 2008 my back needs some work.

This post feels sort of aimless, it's wandering about and not really doing anything of use.

Rather like me today. I'm taking my silent pause and waiting for real life to happen tomorrow.

ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death....

These are the opening lines to Keats' poem, 'The Eve of St.Agnes', published in 1820. It's one of my favourite Romantic poems but it's particularly fitting at the moment because the Eve of St.Agnes is on the 20th of January, so only a couple of weeks away. These lines completely sum up how cold and bleak it is right now with snow on the ground and that grinding bitter chill that the wind has in January. Snow always brings a silence and draws in the world as sound no longer carries over the soft white blanket.

I was looking for a photograph which exists in my head - a snow covered field with a broken down fence picked out in black charcoal lines against the white canvas of the sky and to the left in the distance stands a solitary hare, the only sign of life in a wintry scene.

Very poetic.

However, no one appears to have taken this photograph or painted this image yet, so after a brief search on DeviantArt I found this rather beautiful one by Polaroid Dragon, it's called Dying Daylight.

And now after thinking about the cold I'm off out to a yoga class.

Snow

It’s just before 8 am and my plans to go to a Hungarian art film screening tonight (oooh, doesn’t that sound nicely pretentious!) are scuppered….Thick snow outside and it’s still snowing now. Not going to the film screening I can live with – chances are it would have been dull and full of women in sandals with wild hair (I know I have the wild hair, but I only wear sandals during the summer, not when there is snow on the ground) or tall thin men with haircuts that are only matched in their pretension by their glasses – I’m sure you know the type, if not take a trip down to Hoxton….

What worries me more is that the snow might linger and Jo and I will have to call off our planned night on the town tomorrow! Missing an intellectual night I can deal with but missing a night of chatting up strange men! And I’ve got a haircut planned tomorrow…right, checking the BBC weather website now in the hope that the snow will go away later….