Unpredictable weather

Everyone seems to be complaining about the snow at the moment.  Everyone except me, and I’m normally the one who complains about it first.  Surprising.

When the snow comes in December and January, many people are excited about it – it looks so beautiful, it’s fun to play in, it brings the nation together and we sometimes get snow days.  Many reasons to love the snow in the winter.  I, however, don’t love snow in the winter.  It does look awesome, but this positive is outweighed, for me, by the facts that it’s cold, I don’t particularly like playing in it (because I get cold very easily), it makes it difficult to get around, and snow days are actually a pain for me.

So, it’s still snowing, and it’s nearly April.  Because this snow is not causing any significant disruption to my life, and because it’s not actually that cold at the moment, I don’t really mind it.  But everyone else seems to have an issue with it.  Common quotes go along the lines of ‘It’s nearly April, it shouldn't be snowing now’.  Snow at this time of year seems to go against people’s sense of what the weather “should” be like.  This sounds like the sort of thing I would say.  I tend to like things the way they “should” be.  But when it comes to the weather, I love how unpredictable it can be in this country.  It amuses me that it could be snowing in April, sunny in December, and pouring with rain in July.  I know the unpredictability of it can be annoying, and can disrupt plans for sport, or picnics, or whatever, and this does annoy me too.  But at the same time, the fickleness of it all amuses me.

I'm a little surprised by the extent to which people are complaining about the recent snow, when they seem delighted with the much larger amounts of it in the winter.  Maybe people are just bored with it now, whereas I was already bored with it back in December.  Maybe it is simply about what the weather ‘should’ be like, and people are now longing for some warmth and sunshine.  Maybe people want either no snow or lots of snow, not these vague snow showers we've been having.  But I like it.  Not because it’s snow – as I've said, I don’t really like snow at all – but because it’s an example of our wonderfully unpredictable weather.

So there you go – a blog post about the weather.  How British of me.

Sledging fail

Yesterday I went sledging with some friends.  The slope we were using had two sections.  I was completely unable to get onto the lower section.  I'd either stop early or slide of the edge.  For some reason, this got inside my head and I got really frustrated.  I didn't care about doing the lower section, or I'd have just started halfway down.  I just wanted to try the whole thing.  My friends gave me advice but nothing I tried made any difference.  I tried different starting positions, different amounts of leaning, different positions on the sledge, different sledges, different leg positions.  No win.  What frustrated me was not that I couldn't get onto the lower section.  It was that I wasn't improving.  There was nothing I could do to get there.

It's a bit like losing a competitive sport match.  There are two ways of losing - losing because you played badly, or losing because the opposition were simply too good.  I think most people prefer to lose by just being outclassed, because they want to have played as well as they can.  I disagree.  I would prefer to lose because of playing badly, because then at least I can go away and improve, I know there is something I can do to change things next time.  I don't like losing at all, but especially if there is nothing I could have done to do better.  Just like the sledging - I hated being unable to change anything to improve.

Snow (2)

Last winter, I wrote about how snow has the potential to bring out the best in people.
This winter, I want to mention how it can also bring out the worst in people.  For example, throwing snowball at innocent strangers' cars, houses, or bodies.  Or leaving Tesco carpark littered with trolleys.  This saddens me.

Snow

The night before last it snowed in Durham, which reminded me of something I plnned to write a few weeks ago. Here it is.
Snow is fun. It looks really cool, and sledging, snowball fights etc, are very enjoyable. But after a while, it all gets annoyingly wet and cold, some of it turns to sluch, and travelling, by foot or wheels, is difficult. Snow is fun, but then it gets annoying.
The best thing about snow is not sledging or snowmans or anything like that. The best thing is the strange way that it unites people. Complete strangers will suddenly go out of their way to help each other out of a problem caused by snow. It's nice to see.