online: 19 december 2010 modified: 17 december 2010 17 december 2010 snowbound
London
...looking through double glass windows at this changed world of snow at dusk beneath pinkish grey sky... and seeing only occasional cars moving slowly... and a few people walking on several centimetres of newly fallen snow... i don't think i've seen such snowfall so early in 40 years in London... the snow surface is mostly unmarked by pedestrians or vehicles... and there is no traffic sound... or sight of birds... or other feeling of being in a big city... but rather one of inhabited countryside...
...all day i've been resting and reading and eating and texting or watching snow falling on everything as airborne moisture freezes in crystals that turn transparency into whiteness... against which the vertical surfaces of tree trunks and buildings cars and people show up in strong contrast... to comprise a new and brief world of white winter universal... in a pattern of dark against white...
...i've not seen a bus or a truck while writing this for twenty minutes though usually there are intermittent streams of each...but now i see one single decker bus that stopped briefly across the road beyond the lawn... and then it moved silently on...
...all but the smallest branches of the hawthorn at the kitchen window are carrying about two centimetres of snow which may freeze as the cloud cover disappears and the predicted clear night sky lets heat escape from the earth until the air is well below freezing.... after which the predicted wind could bring ice loaded trees and branches falling... or perhaps the wind will come first and blow snow off the branches before it can freeze solid...
...what a dynamic in a scene of apparent all-white peacefulness or inactivity...
...the sodium discharge light from the street lamps in itself seems more like nature than artifice... clothing the city in a uniformity of inhuman colour...
...a solitary car with lights flashing turns slowly and gingerly before moving off... at which a convoy of about five other cars brings movement to this scene that was predominantly still... like the city forest (where today i didn't venture)... before the peace of no vehicles or people resumes...
...as i go to look outside i see that a post person has delivered a Christmas and New Year card of 31 national flags hanging outside a terraced house and there are new footmarks in the soft snow outside the door...
...and (as millions have perhaps remarked) the snow-covered world can seem better and more beautiful than the more artificial world of warmer times and places...
...quiet now in the night i enjoy the warmth of indoors at this
increasingly arctic latitude... with confused thoughts of an ice age perhaps recurring locally as globe and oceans warm...
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