Deep and Crisp and Even

You may have heard that it's been snowing in parts of the UK (in northern Europe generally, in fact), causing immense disruption to the transport system. Luckily, we haven't had to travel anywhere (except for a visit to my parents in Lyme Regis this weekend just past), so haven't been majorly affected.

(All those travellers moaning and complaining about the interruptions to their rail and air services should have lived through the winter of 1962-63 (I think it was -- that or 1963-64), when the snow fell in December and stayed until March. We were then living in the village of Porton, outside Salisbury, and for several days at a time couldn't get out of the village at all; the roads were that impassable. Modern yoof of today -- don't know they're born, stuffing themselves with junk food, surfing for naughty pictures on the internet, etc. etc.. Hanging's too good for them -- string 'em up anyway -- where was I?)

Snow doesn't tend to stay very long when it falls in London, because the "heat island" effect means that the temperatures very rarely fall below freezing. But below freezing temperatures are what we have now, because the conditions are almost totally windless, meaning that the air mass which has moved down across the North Sea from Scandinavia has not been shifted out again by the westerlies which normally determine our weather. The snow which has fallen has therefore stayed; where it has melted at all, it has turned to ice (visible and invisible), making the roads and pavements very slippery. It is therefore possible that we will be having a white Christmas here in London, and the bookmakers who take bets on this sort of thing every year will be paying out big time. (Ho ho. Or ho ho ho, as Father Christmas might say.)

These photographs were taken yesterday evening, at around 6.00pm, a few minutes after the snow had ceased falling. (It began as cold rain about 3.00pm and then turned to sleet before falling as snow at around 4.00pm.) They show the views from our windows, and from the streets outside, as we headed off for a drinks party at a neighbour's. The images look brighter than the conditions actually were, because I was using the camera's "night landscape" setting with a long exposure time; that accounts for some of the blurring.