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SNOW DAY!
It was a cold day and on my morning dog walk I was thinking how I’d be able to get the kids on a lunchtime walk by letting them know about all the icy puddles on the path.
But then out of nowhere (no wait, just checked, it came out of the sky) snow started falling. And settling. And within the space of an hour the village was covered in an inch or so of snow.
So our after lunch walk was full of snow balls and snow angels and crunching untrod swathes of whiteness beneath our wellington boots. It’s the stuff from which early memories are forged. My daughter says she wishes that there was snow every day, but I argue that it wouldn’t be so special then and she’d miss the sun and she concedes that we should have six months of sun followed by six months of snow.
But she’s still wrong, the ridiculous tiny idiot. The good thing about snow (in our weird climate) is that it arrives quickly and disappears quickly and the window where it is soft and unslushy and fun is tiny.
I suppose you’d like it to be Christmas every day too, would you?
She says yes.
I blame the teachers…. Shit that’s us.
To prove my point by the end of our short walk I could tell that the temperature had changed and snow was turning into slush. I’d been promising we could build a snowman in our garden, but now I wondered if we’d left it too late and it turned out we could now see the tips of the blades of grass on our small lawn, which had all been covered when we left.
We got to work making snowmen. I hadn’t cleared the cat shit off the lawn for a little while and found that I was picking some of it up as I rolled my big snowball on the grass. I quickly got it covered up and inside the body of the snowman and then cleverly rolled him right on to the flowerbeds so the poop inside him would be deposited there when he melted. You don’t see that in Raymond Briggs’ cartoon, but it would make it more realistic if you did. Plus sort of give the snowmen intestines. If they’re so keen to be alive, then they have to take everything on, including the shitting bit. Even if they are shitting cat shit. And only in death. It’s still brings them one step closer to humanity.
Anyway, I am not going to clear up any more cat shit from the lawn, just wait for snow and then let the snowman do it. NB doesn’t work for the diarrhoea that the dog did on top of the snow, so will need to do some work before I take this one into Dragon’s Den.
My snowman was OK if you ignored the internal faeces, but my daughter’s effort was smaller and already suffering from meltage and when she tried to stick a carrot in its face the snowman’s head fell apart (again not something that Raymond Briggs covered - I wonder if he’d ever actually made a snowman in his life), so the fun day of memories in the snow ended in tears.
But to be fair, all of my childhood snow memories include tears: whether it was being pelted with snowballs from close quarters by some kids I’d met in the street and then heading back in tears to my mum (I was 28 years old) or walking over the Mendips in 6ft snow drifts, getting a bit lost and being frozen to the bone and having to get in the bath as soon as we got home to avoid hypothermia, or sledging on plastic sheets with my sister and following her down the slope too closely, spinning round and then crashing into her at pace. I made an igloo in the garden once and don’t remember crying then. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t.
Still I somehow think of those days as glorious and magical, even though they are all associated with pain and tears that froze on my face.
Will the 3 year old remember today? Probably not. The nearly six year old should though. She still wishes it would snow every day, even after the cat shit snowman and snowman whose icy face caved in in her hands (and then got stamped to death in frustration -again Briggs why no mention of that).,
Where there is magic we box away the pain and it doesn’t matter so much.
