Wednesday, February 23, 2005
You know, I don't normally get nostalgic for London. I hated my time there, hated the country, hated everything about it. Only a few things survive intact from that barrage of "god this place sucks", like Pizza Express, Wagamama's, the general feel of living alone with nobody to shout at you, and I really rather liked my flat. On the flipside, my life is about six hundred times better here and the Internet is twelve times faster, so I'm more than happy with getting rid of those trade-offs.
But when I heard it was snowing in London... alright, that brought back some memories. About two years and a month ago it suddenly started snowing in London. I do remember it as quite probably being the best day I ever had there. I actually raced to the Blog first to look for an entry on it, but it seems it came a few months before I started blogging in earnest (and yes, you can argue this post comes a few months after I STOPPED blogging in earnest, but please ignore the symmetry). But there are pictures, which you can see if you click the funny underlined word here.
I've seen snow before. But I hadn't seen snow in London before, and I had never seen it fall. The closest I came to both was when tiny snow droplets fall and then melt instantly on whatever they touch, which happened all too often in London and rather represented my feelings that anything that country touched turned to -- ahem. Anyway, this time it was different. The ground was tinged with white and getting whiter by the minute. But the sky... I have to say it was a sort of mesmerising sight. Just watching the snow swirl and flutter and fall was addictive. I stood by the window for an hour just watching it fall, at which point I reached for the phone, missed because I was still looking at the snow fall, found it and dialled Kavi. Conversing with him was fairly hard because both our jaws were slack and our eyes were fixed on the snow. Incidentally, he's from Bangkok and had never seen snow to begin with. He does however own a pair of snow gloves, which in the absence of seeing any action in real snow he put on whenever he ate ice cream. I have pictures of this if you don't believe me.
After finishing with Kavi, I pretty much called up everyone I ever knew (and some I didn't; wrong numbers are easy when you hack at a telephone without looking at the numbers) to incoherently babble something about snow. Oddly enough, Kavi and I were kindred spirits in our appreciation of the cold wet white stuff falling from above. Everyone else in London only bitched and moaned that cold wet white stuff was falling all over them and making them cold and wet. Despite this I mustered my unusually boundless enthusiasm to corral Reshma and Nicola into a post-work drink. Commence the really odd sight of me racing through London with a huge grin on my face looking at everything as if I was looking at it for the first time -- which was semi-true, because though I'd seen London before I hadn't seen London with a layer of white on it.
When I got home, the snow had settled into a layer less than an inch thick. This didn't dissuade me from going into the little grass verge in the carpark surrounded by rubbish huts (which people are rather fond of picnicking on -- see here for more) to play in the snow. Unfortunately, someone else got there first and razed vast tracts of snow to create a rather pathetic six-inch snowman. I swore never to so something so stupid. Instead, I went to my balcony and carved my name into the snow with my fingers, almost giving myself frostbite in the process.
A fine end to an utterly fine day.
Posted at 2:36 AM
