The White Stuff

If you think after all the acres of print I’m going to say something about the snow, well you’d be absolutely right.  Come on, we don’t get enough of it to be blasé, let the inner child rise to the surface as you hurl snowballs at hapless passers by or build wonky snowmen wearing West Ham hats.* Yes I know shopping has gone a bit Soviet what with a shortage of bread and milk.  But I look at it like this; here at Fort St. Matthews we still have half a tin of Roses chocolates and a box of Thorntons plus a few bottles of wine from Christmas, what’s the problem?  The unusual weather has thrown up some interesting sartorial problems,  mostly for teenage boys.  Me, I wear anything that keeps me warm no matter what it looks like.  My one ‘must have’ was a fabulous fur hat I saw  Kirstie Allsopp wearing when she presented  ‘Kirstie’s  Homemade Christmas.’  I’m still slightly reeling from that programme actually as I wonder just who it was aimed at.  The creative stuff she produced looked luscious from Christmas crackers to truffles all starting from scratch.  Maybe that’s the bit that flummoxed me.  Who has time to do these things?  Pre-Christmas a time related frenzy grips most of us.  Not enough time to browse for ideal presents it can become the token gift or just wildly inappropriate (my mum was just baffled by the Gun’s and Roses T-shirt; maybe she’d have preferred the Prodigy?).  No time to bedeck or bedazzle in the Coe house, just a mad dash to get stuff sent in the mail.  And don’t even get me started on the ’stand and deliver’ policy that the post office is operating under these days.  Anyhoo, that hat Kirstie was wearing.  It was a gorgeous Cossack style fur hat and if Primark ever make a copy I will purchase it.

The teen tribes, as tough as a Geordie on a hen night refused point blank to wear anything as sissy as a coat.  They shivered in their school sweatshirts which is why schools decided to shut otherwise a flu epidemic would be inevitable.  Finally a truce was called between frantic parents and frozen moody kids.  It was okay to wear a jacket but the hat of choice was a ’sock’ hat.  Kind of funky but keeps reminding me of Mr. Smee from ‘Peter Pan.’  And guess who had to go and buy the hat.  I should have knitted it myself and created a whole new look.  Personally I’m sorry that leg warmers didn’t make a come back. I used to wear a pair in the 70’s.  The were really long and a sort of fair isle pattern in pink.  Seriously they were rocking, Bananarama meets  Fame.  Young people don’t know how to dress that’s the problem.

But come on.  Snow!!  Didn’t yer love it?  Think of the benefits, the unexpected day off to watch ‘Loose women’, the wonderful excuse not to go to work when quite frankly you have been ordered to stay at home by a BBC presenter.  And don’t you think it has bought out the nicer qualities in people?  I have a theory that one of the English characteristics is not to function very well in the heat.  Law and order break down, not to mention the deodorants that only work up till midday.  No, give us something Spartan to get our teeth into and we’ll clear paths, push cars and get shopping and other essential items for the housebound.

And I think we here in Hastings, when we finally got it, made the most of it.  There’s something to be said for sitting looking out the window at the gentle endless veil of falling snowflakes.  Have you seen a magnified snowflake? Simply put it’s water vapour in clouds condensed into ice but they are phenomenally beautiful and complex, built upon the shape of a hexagon.  Millions of them fall and they say no two are the same yet these objects of beauty are crunched underfoot and then simply melt away.  If you asked God why He designed something of such beauty that can’t be seen by the naked eye and just disappears I think He’d say He does it because He can.  How cool is that.

One more thing.  The next time you see an unblemished stretch of snow, dazzling and pristine just think about the verse from Isaiah.  The Lord says ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow…’.  Even more amazing than a snowflake.

*obviously nothing to do with me.