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Snow day! The kids absolutely full of glee to come downstairs this morning and see chunky flakes of snow falling from the sky. Of course they were. Snow is the most exciting thing there is. To a kid anyway. Adults have drugs and booze. But snow is kid cocaine and heroin speedball/snowball.
Though I suppose only to a kid who lives in a place where it rarely snows. If you live in a place where there's always snow and it snows pretty much every day I am guessing kids are pretty blase about snow and pissed off about having to learn the 53 words for it. In the UK snow can mean a day off school. To the Inuit snow is a day at school.
When Eskimo kids see grass though, they go off their nut, picking it up, chucking it at each other, putting grass down each other's tops, making grass angels, building grassmen. Sometimes the grassmen come to life and fly them down to the Amazon rainforest or the Congo Basin where they meet Papa Greenio.
There must be a snow tipping point. In the UK snow is rare enough that it is always super exciting and in Alaska it is common enough to be never exciting. So there must be a point and location where snow tips over from being thrilling and rare to being normal. Where the kids neither take it for granted or are amazed to see it. What a sad place that must be to live. i wonder where it is and how many days of snow you need to get before it doesn't lift (or deflate) a single kids' heart. If you live there, let me know.
Life isn't worth living unless you find snow (or grass) to be the greatest emotional rollercoaster of your life. With snow you start with glee and end in tears. It's always the case as I point out in my latest stand-up show. Sure enough though the morning started with squealing and laughter and a tiny snowman called Jeffrey (for some reason), when I dropped the kids off at school the snow was slush and those youngsters couldn't resist making snowballs and at least one child went into class in tears.
Back in the winter of 75-76 (I think) I had had a snowball fight with some kids I didn't know very well (I'd only recently moved to Cheddar) which ended up in our back garden. I fell or was tripped and went down behind a bush and the other kids proceeded to pelt me with snow or iceballs from about two feet away. The snow stung and burned my face. I somehow managed to get to my feet and stagger to the back door in tears, as my mum came out to see if I was OK and told the local ruffians that playtime was over.
I was 28 years old.
Even once we've experienced the pain of snow days we still get excited by the next one. Unless we live in a place with maybe 183 days of snow a year, in which case we're neither bothered or inconvenienced.
It was International Men's Day - there is one apparently - and for the last few years I have asked people to nominate admirable men on Twitter and make a deal of this day on November 19th rather than March 8th. It's been quite an inspiring thing to be fair, but this year, the rapid decline of that social media platform was highlighted quite well. Nowhere near as many people joined in as usual and of those that did there was a small but noticeable percentage were more interested in making anti-trans comments. It might well be the straw that breaks the camel's back for me. My account remains open, but I think I will mainly post elsewhere now. It's a shame as the place has been a lot of fun and I've made a lot of friends there, but now it's like a pub where you'd open the door, take one look at the people in there and quickly walk away. It's not about staying in your bubble, but hanging out with people you like and not getting interrupted by pricks who won't let you do anything without them telling you what they think about something you're not really that bothered about.
Anyway, those people will find their way over to the next place to ruin that too. But for now I'll leave them to it.
Joining Chesney Hawkes for the final live RHLSTP of 2024 is this year's Edinburgh Comedy Award Winner Amy Gledhill. It's going to be a brilliant night.
Get your tickets here 
