Days Like Today

So, I had a couple of ideas about which I could write this week’s entry.
I considered bemoaning the probable final death of my car at the hands of joy-riders. I thought about doing something on the woman who discovered her husband having cybersex via facebook. Or I was shocked at my own paranoia and doom-mongering when I missed a piece of registered post on Saturday and spent thirty-six hours convincing myself, given my current run of bad luck, that was someone suing me, or the police summoning me to court for a crime I wasn’t even aware I’d committed, when in fact it was just my degree certificate. I even considered doing a piece about my turn as a Master of Ceremonies at a recent book launch and the perils of associated vanity (plus the subsequent too-much-too-quick white wine fiasco).

But instead as it’s winter and London’s transport network has ground to a halt, begging someone to come along and put it out of its misery with a single bullet to the temple, and I’ve consequently been barricaded into the house by a three foot deep drift outside the front door, I felt it really had to about snow.

It’s just gone five in the afternoon as I type this, the light is fading and it hasn’t stopped snowing all day. The grey air is still filled with flecks of clear-white that cascade over the roof slates like tears. Outside, the layers pile deeper and thicker across the cars and the pavement as it packs itself into icy blocks.

I went out earlier to buy some milk and some soup. It felt like a soup day. At end of my drive I noticed the lid from the recycling box was missing and that snow clung to empty beer cans and rough drafts of my writings.

“Strange,” I thought.

I took my step carefully as the pavements hadn’t been gritted and it had become much more slippy since I’d ventured down to the locked up station first thing. When I came to Hilly Fields I realised where the box lid had gone. Kids were everywhere, throwing snowballs, rolling snowmen, skidding along on makeshift sledges, their bodies pulling troughs through the ground in criss-crossing patterns of beautiful randomness.

The news has been saying that this is the heaviest snow fall in eighteen years, which if I think about it must be right.

It was February too and the schools were closed for a couple of days. This is one of those memories that probably didn’t quite happen like this, but it’d make existence so much better if it had happened exactly like this.

My parents live at the bottom of quite a steep road on the outskirts of Birmingham. There were four of us. Me, Mark, Oscar and one other whose name I can’t recall. Was it Tom before he moved away? Or perhaps it was James, but he didn’t live that close by, did he? It doesn’t really matter. We could have been four fictional boys, really.

We had three sledges between us. Two cheapo plastic ones, probably bright orange, and someone (not me) had one of the classic, traditional wooden sledges that you sometimes still see on Christmas Cards. Three sledges, four boys. How to ensure that a game involved all four at the same time?

A sledge train, that’s how.

The boy in the first sledge would lie on his back, facing backwards and holding the rope of the wooden sledge which followed. The third boy would lie on his front behind the wooden sledge and hold onto the back. The fourth boy would pull the whole thing along to get maximum speed up before sending the others flying off down the road.

And hoping a car wasn’t coming around the bend halfway down the hill.

I’m not sure which was the best/scariest position. The boy in the first sledge would have no idea what was happening because he couldn’t see, but he’d have the sensation of speed and the knowledge that he’d take the brunt of any collision. The boy sitting in the middle, upright on the taller, classic sledge, felt the least in control. He wasn’t holding onto any of the other sledges and was the most likely to be flung off into a drift. The boy at the back, ah, now he was able to manipulate the thrill by using his arms to swing from side to side like a runaway caravan. If he timed it right he’d be able to use the momentum and the racing line of the bend to release himself and overtake the other two. Time it wrong and he’d crash into a parked car.

I remember doing this again and again for hour after hour, working our way equally through each of positions in the chain. I remember being soaked from the inside and out and the burning flush in my cheeks.

Like I said, it probably didn’t quite happen like that, but who cares? That’s how I remember it and that’s what is important to me.

That’s it for this week. London and the South-East are currently closed for “maintenance”. See you when they open up again.