Snow!!

Well, the snow finally arrived with a vengeance on Monday night. At some time after midnight I looked out to see the road outside white over. By the time I got up on Monday morning the snowploughs had done their work and the road was clear. There is about 4 – 5 inches of snowing lying in the gardens around here, canals are half frozen and cars that haven’t been driven are big white mounds at the roadside but it’s nothing insurmountable. 
 
This hasn’t stopped chaos ensuing, of course. 150 schools were closed in Greater Manchester because of snow yesterday. Compare that with 34 schools closed in mountainous bits of Galicia, where they have also had snow to contend with. Yes, I know that Greater Manchester is a much more built-up area with a lot more school to take into account but it’s not exactly mountainous. And we did know that the snow was supposed to be coming. Our eldest grandchild’s school took what they call a “snow day”; in other words they chose to use one of their occasional extra days off and shut the school for the day. Fifteen minutes up the road and up rather steeper roads and side roads that are less likely to be cleared by snow ploughs, the smaller grandchildren’s primary school remained open. There really is little logic to it. 

The north of Spain has also been hit by something called Gong. This is apparently a cyclogenesis, such an odd scientific term that I had to look it up. It clearly means something to do with the birth and growth (genesis) of a wind system of some sort. And that’s more or less what the scientific definitions told me, when I eventually found them. Some online dictionaries didn’t seem to believe it was a word. Anyway it led to closure of airports in some places and blew down some trees in Vigo, according to one report I read. Here’s a YouTube video of waves in Castro Urdiales. I hope all this weather had calmed down when we head to Vigo in a couple of weeks’ time. 
 
Back here in the frozen Northwest, the sun has come out today, compared with continual thin sleety stuff which we had yesterday. So I am about to stir my husband into action and go and stomp around in the snowy countryside for a while.