Monochrome mid-Wales

It started to snow here yesterday as dusk fell and the darkness deepened, so that the temperature dropped just the one or two degrees needed to switch day-long rain to sleet and then sloppy snow.  We pulled the curtains and ignored it, concentrating more on ourselves, our dinners, our pets and the TV than what was going on outside the windows. 

The Dog loves TV as well.  I have mentioned that before, on here.  Some dogs just don't "see" TV apparently, or perhaps they ignore it as it doesn't smell, but ours has always been fascinated by it.  If we are on a commercial channel he is particularly thrilled, as he adores the ads.  They are that bit louder, so the change in volume alerts him, he rouses himself from his doze and stares avidly at the screen, as SO many ads have animals in them.  Here he is on the qui vive waiting to see what fetches up in the ad break by way of threat or prey...

Yes, I know that looks like a bleached-out variant of the blue screen of death, but it's just what turned up on the camera during the exposure.  I don't like using flash.  Earlier in the evening we had lost our TV signal for a short while, which is what happens if you retire to the hilly green loveliness at the slap-bang centre of Wales.  If your nearest transmitter or signal booster loses power you've had it, as telly can't seem to see round corners past the lumps and bumps to the next one.  Or something la la like that.

We'd had a half-hearted half inch of white when the Dog stepped out into the garden to ablute and go grrrr just before we all retired to the night.  Just eight hours later we awoke to this

which is the totally natural untouched black and white view we had at 7.30am from the study window.  A few dozen miles to the North East of us are Mold and Wrexham, the twin foci of yesterday's oval of intense snow in Wales, where they had an all-day white-out.  Ten inches fell - with drifting.  Calamitous travel conditions were created.  The day-time shift of the various emergency services must have been exhausted when they finally clocked off from digging out or towing vehicles, closing roads and generally coming to the rescue, of commuters especially.

But today is Saturday, praise be to the working calendar!  In our neck of the woods, no-one is stirring except on foot.  Cars are still where they were parked last night, transmuted into smooth white mounds like jelly moulds, and a soothing muffled quality has descended on the backing track of daily life.

The football supporters of Wrexham have a journey to Wembly to make tomorrow.  I am keen that the snowplough train can lead the way to get them there, but here and now, Goldenoldenlady is going nowhere.  The Husband is creaking the upstairs floorboards doing something hobbity and husbandish, but I cannot be troubled to enquire further.  The Dog is having forty winks before he settles down to some concentrated snoozing to be followed by a half-hour's shut-eye.  There is still coffee in the pot, food in the fridge and larder, wine on the rack.  If we want to be "snowed-in" we can be.

I do hope no-one else feels under an pressure to go far, by motor, today.  Is someone in labour, or respitory distress, or pumping arterial blood on the bedroom carpet ?  No?  Then stop where you are and enjoy the snowiest late March weekend for decades.  It'll be worth it.  Like times long past.  In the 1960s - the decade of my childhood growing up in an old stone weaver's house on a Lancashire hillside - March and even April snow could and did descend quite often.  It was the norm, almost, so this is very nostalgic spring weather for me.  I intend not to resent it, or at the very least not today.