Ok, so normally decent snow is rare in the UK (well it's never been more than 3-4inches in my experience for the 10 or so years I've lived here). Last Christmas, January, February and March we in Southampton got no snow whatsoever, except for one pathetic attempt sometime in January where a few flakes graced us with their presence and laced the trees and ground. The result, it looked like someone had sprinkled a small amount of icing sugar from a giant sieve in the clouds.
In December 2010 I seem to remember that there was a lot of snow all over the UK and France (although I was actually in Nice for the most part, where we had none whatsoever, not even snowflakes). When I went to Manchester for two weeks over Christmas to stay with the family, there was a large amount of snow. We succeeded, in the week after New Years, to actually walk on a frozen canal in the countryside which we all found greatly amusing. My mother proceeded to inform us that this was the kind of thing that 'never happened in England anymore' and the last time she remembered it happening was 'the great freeze-up of 1960-something' when she was five years old and somehow they all ended up driving a Jeep onto a lake in Norfolk without the ice cracking and they got kicks out of pushing each other around the lake on kitchen chairs.*
Anyways, upon my return to Nice in January 2011 there was no snow on the ground. However, we travelled up to Chamonix in February for two and a half weeks where we stayed in an Alpine mountain village next to a ski station called 'Le Grand Bornand'. There, I well and truly experienced snow, for the first time in my life. When it started snowing there, it never seemed to stop. I remember going for a walk one afternoon in the sun, getting half-way up the mountain when it started to snow heavily, blundering in an unknown direction for half an hour (praying that I was on my way down the mountain, rather than off it) and then ending up in a forest when it stopped snowing, somewhere beyond the log cabin we were staying in, WAIST deep in snow. It was a very spectacular moment! That was certainly snow like I'd never experienced!
Anyways, on Friday this week, I woke up to an 'It-snowed-in-Manchester' phone call from my father at 7:30am. I sleepily and irritably denied any possible claims that Southampton had been snowed in, but as I hung up a seed of doubt was planted within me. I hadn't even looked out of the window by this point but getting out from under the duvet is a task in itself at that hour of the day (especially in a chilly student house, ha, ha).
When I did get out of bed, guess what I saw? Yep. I looked out through the curtains to our (ahem) lovely back garden and the whole place was actually covered with about three inches of snow. And it was continuing to fall. I was supposed to be going for a run in the Common that morning with one of my housemates, but needless to say we postponed it. We did, however, go to the Common!
There was some Narnia-esque scenery awaiting us at the Common.
We got back at midday, because I did actually have an exam scheduled for 2:30pm. However, in the true spirit of the UK ethos, it was cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions. The ground was pretty icy and made driving/walking anywhere difficult, why was why they cancelled it I suppose. BUT...they rescheduled the exam. For the FOLLOWING SATURDAY.
Which means I am going to be stuck in the house for one week longer than necessary, intermittently revising and procrastinating.
But I think the silver lining is that we got some beautiful, powdery snow, deep enough to make a snowman with. We've named him Mr Gordon and he is in the below photograph.
