Snow

The long-awaited winter has finally come, and we have snowfall. It's hard to believe that snow is a good sign because it means a rise in the temperature. But so it proves: the -22 degrees in which I walked to work this morning had shot up by all of ten or fifteen degrees by the time I was walking home. The price to pay is that you get damp as well as just freezing, your bag goes soggy, the "sidewalk" is treacherous and the roads are instantaneously full of murky slush with which the ankles of the unwary are deluged by passing cars. I will say, though, that it is otherwise picturesque in the extreme: when the snow began I was in a large-windowed room, and the gentle drop and whirl of the white flakes ouside was quite mesmerising.
Not picturesque, however, is my get-up. Naturally I refuse to make any concession in style. In order, therefore, to avoid hypothermia and death, I am obliged to supplement my little dresses and skirty outfits with: two pairs of tights, a vest, a petticoat, an additional cardigan, trousers over the tights, a big coat, woolly socks, moonboots, a hat, one or two scarves, and gloves. (Actually, strike the gloves: it is too cold for them. If you wear gloves your fingers start to go numb starting with your pinkies, and the only way I could get home without frostbite tonight was to ball my fingers up in the palm bit of the glove as if they were mittens. Easier just to wear mittens, really.) So I spend the first ten minutes of the working day alarming other users of the department by my frantic disrobing. The wearying prospect of having to put it all back on to pop out to the bank and then strip it all off again on my return is (mirabile dictu) actually enough to keep me at my desk working all day; equally remarkable is how dramatically the urgent need for confectionery wanes when you have to change your shoes to go and get it. Just as well I'm not at university in Tahiti.