Walked back with people from work. Laughing at fear of slipping. Watching the cars and the vans slide on even the lightest gradient. Snow seems suddenly dangerous. A woman falls in front of us. We go to help her up. She is worried that she has banged her head (she hasn't). We do not know whether the woman who has fallen is a masculine woman or a transvestite. Debate rages until we go our separate ways.
Looking down at the Mews, and the ghost-flurries continue, covering the footsteps I left there earlier. When I got back from work, there was a lost man looking for number 12. I walked with him to the end of the Mews, where the number '12' was quite prominently displayed on the door. Left him knocking on the post-flap (suddenly forgot what they're called - you know, those things you post letters through - post box? No, they're the red things you leave your letters in... Letter box? Letter flap?)
The strange sadness of last night has transmuted itself into something else, some kind of portent. Post-midnight air seems full of omens. Go to sleep and wake up, half expecting to be under siege by the snow - I imagine work will be dilapidated tomorrow. All those people stuck at their outlying towns; Eastbourne, Peacehaven, Newhaven... Andy gets a lift back from work, and half an hour after that gets a text from the person who gave him the lift back, saying that he is stuck 'somewhere near Findon' and is having to stay in his car the night...
The middle of March and it suddenly feels like the snow of early 1991... to be precise. The last great snowfall I can remember before, all those years - over a decade - a decade and a half - of snowless winters and too-hot summers.
I remember the first snow of 1991. I remember helping a man push his car up Woodstock Drive, I remember a man in his fifties, looking like he had stepped out of 1950s New York looking for a church, I remember being two and a half hours late for an interview at Chelsea art college, the bearded man who gave me my interview, and my apologies for my lateness 'yes, of course, the snow, all the tube trains must be delayed'.
