Snow Days

The news from the Annabee front: Went to Celtic Connections. Had time of my life. Is unutterably shit to be home. Got snowed in. Sledged. Got withering glances from children too old to sledge.

Strange few days watching people trying to dig their vehicles out of drives, or abandoning cars mid-journey at the sort of jaunty angles that we British are usually loathe to do. (When was the last time you saw a car not at a nice crisp right-angle? Why is it that depresses me? But then I am the sort of person who makes it their policy to drive around supermarket carparks against the arrows’ diktats. My own little suburban rebellion...) My whole estate is like a giant slush puppy. (They’re not called that anymore, are they? They’ve been raped by rebranding and given names like ‘Ice Blast’, and sterilized by having all the real sugar removed, and forced to dwell only with cinema junk food.) Anyway, as I’ve been watching my neighbours’ futile revving from my desk at the window, I too have been spinning my wheels. (Gie us a fucking job, mate. Go on...)

There’s that strange air of deflation that happens after snow, and its clean excitement, have left the party, and you are left only with sludgy dregs and come down. I think there is a collective recognition that snow engenders a kind of child-like abandon. Even in a quiet British adult sort of way. People start talking to each other again - even in London, where we all tacitly acknowledge the massive invisible sheet of cling film we must puncture if we are to communicate with ‘strangers’. Snow is a clean white leveller - it makes the landscape uniform, and bright, and strangely happy, and it takes away unfriendly human impositions like flat surfaces and right-angles. I think it has a similar subconscious resonance. Just for a day or two we get a friendly blanket over all the dark nasty stuff of humanity, of life, grit, emotion, and subconscious - we get a free pass of clean start, sins temporarily pardoned. And we embrace it, euphorically. God, but we need it, no? Fucking wasps...

And then the slush and come-down.

First posted on Facebook, 7th February 2008