1 - From Snow to Sun - An airport, a February summer and a Wedding

Winter snow arrived early in 2010 and the snow was still with us in January 2011, at times so deep that it was impossible to go anywhere.  This all made building snow teddy bears








amazing icicles






and musing at tyre hearts on the street, the main activities.





But luckily  we had other plans and by the end of January we had swapped the chilly snowbound UK for sunnier climes. 

After 12 hours on a plane waiting at an airport for a connecting flight can be daunting.  But there is one airport I really quite like, because it seems to have been designed with human beings in mind...


This is Singapore Airport,

where there are carpets and trees, an outdoor  swimming pool, a butterfly garden and you can go for a shower or even hire a room for a few hours sleep between flights.  Most civilised.

When we arrived there was even a chap playing gentle jazz on a grand piano as if he was in the lounge of some top hotel.




Flying on we landed in Brisbane airport and took the train south to meet friends on the Gold Coast.

It has been a strange time with disasters hitting all around.  Our trip had been planned before the dreadful floods hit Brisbane and we saw little of the devastation that had hit the city and further north, by then the floods had mostly subsided.

Arriving in Auckland we were met by Wayne Mills who is the quiz master of the Kids Lit Quiz .  Wayne was about to leave for the quiz heats in South Africa and then he was off to the heats in Canada where they were joining in the quiz for the first time this year. 

The World finals are being held in New Zealand This year and in July the national finalists from all over the world will come to Hamilton NZ for a fabulous world final event and a chance to see some of the amazing sights in New Zealand.  Teams from two schools, Cockermouth School and Bristol Grammar  in the UK will be there!





The next highlight of our trip was a wedding.  The kiwi bride was beautiful and the setting an amazing stone built family chapel and there was a contingent of Scots there on the groom's side, the men resplendent in their kilts!

The north wind shall blow and we shall have snow - again?

Sue Purkiss, in her excellent blog about snow Dark Lords,Witch Queens, and Snow on ABBA yesterday, said -
'Snow changes what happens, we all know that: ordinary life holds its breath. You can't work any more, so you might as well play. 

But there's something else, something much deeper than that. We are taken back to an older time, when we were bound more closely to nature; to a time when people must have wondered if winter would ever end, and if they could possibly survive it even if it did.' 


We have just had almost two weeks of incredibly deep snow.  When it arrived so early it seemed quite beautiful and a lot of fun, but soon almost all travel was impossible, except on foot through snow that lay a foot deep.

That was when, as Sue says, ordinary life held its breath.  But it felt much more than that.

When day after day we looked out on this altered landscape through snow-crusted windows it should have been an opportunity to get lots done at home, but perhaps we are more instinctive beings than our modern lives would suggest?

Are we more tied to nature, making this deep wintry weather trigger some kind of survival instinct or dread that it would never end?  Is that why some people seem to have reacted strangely to the enforced holiday.

After the first day or so when we cleared paths only to have them as deep in snow by the following morning, it should have been easy to settle down to working at home or doing all those things that there never seems time for.

But instead I was unable to concentrate on anything for very long, as if life was on hold, breathlessly waiting to see when this force of nature would melt away and everything would return to normal.  My friends and neighbours reported the same sense of  waiting, of not-quite-holiday, when day after day we woke to more and more snow, just when we thought it was beginning to disappear, it all came back again, worse than ever.

Most of it finally melted away leaving behind small mountains of hard-packed ice and snow where it had been cleared from the roads.  Most of the deep snow may have gone but many icy paths and pavements are still covered by snow, hardened to solid ice by sub zero temperatures.  It is currently -7 outside  but the latest fall of snow seems to have avoided our little corner of the land and is currently immobilising the north and south.

The forecast threatens - as the nursery rhyme goes -    ' The north wind shall blow and we shall have (more) snow...'   Will we still hold our breath until it all goes away again? Will our instinct for survival make us fight the lethargy or make us want to hibernate until the spring?