Speaking too soon

Remember that thaw? Hmm, not so much. In fact there is a blizzard blowing so severe that I have just taken the tube home although it is only one stop (and a stupidly short stop at that: none of your end-of-the-Metropolitan-line 20 minute jobs), and although it is only 5pm. The speaker-meeting at the department has been cancelled because the speaker can't get in from the airport. The university has officially closed as of an hour ago. The tube was so packed I had to get the second train, a thing which has never happened to me here (and evidently never to any other Torontonians, either, judging by their bemused and stilted inefficiency at packing into tube carriages: move down, for goodness' sake!). Annoyingly, yesterday was glorious, with dazzling sunshine and a blue and perfectly cloudless sky, whereupon I made the hasty judgement that it was spring. Which it's not. Spring, you see, would involve the kind of weather which makes going out in a mini-skirt and open-backed shoes perfectly reasonable; freak blizzards exist to teach the vain and optimistic that moonboots will be necessary till June.

Anyway, I don't know why I'm posting all this, since if you are in Toronto you probably don't need my blog to alert you to the dense and whirling snowstorm outside, and if you're not in Toronto (and congratulations on that, by the way) then the transport difficulties of a remote colonial settlement are simply so much otiose confirmation of the superiority of life in the Old Country. Apparently we're getting torrents of freezing rain later. Yum.