The More It Snows, Tiddly Pom

Laugh and the world laughs with you: cry, and something or other interrupts you just when you want to wallow alone your grief.

How can I mourn the loss of Garden Cottage when we are suddenly snowed into it, sons and all (the schools having meanly evicted them at the first snowflake). True, our landlord could still technically wade across the lawn and, twirling his moustaches in true Victorian melodrama style, cast us out into the icy storm, but as we’re on six months notice it’s not really likely.

So here we huddle, snowbound.

Outside, my elderly car is hunched like a leveret in its form, wing mirrors flat against its head, under a tarpaulin weighed down with snow. In an ideal world the poor old dear would be indoors in this weather,, but the garges are needed to store detritus including our award-winning collection of power saws, two broken wardrobes and a dead Range Rover. Clearly these valuable objects take precedence over my cold but faithful Citroen.

So I set off for a walk, mainly because with so very much snow you feel you ought to do something about it. Number 2 Son had already shown enterprise by sliding down the front slope on a black plastic bin liner. Number 1 Son had gone to earth with a pot of tea and Jeremy Clarkson – his response to most situations, climatic and otherwise. So it was up to me.

I got as far as the village, where I found several neighbours, rarely seen outside their natural habitats, wandering dazedly about like lost souls in Parkas, clutching plastic bags. Strange how the knowledge that you really are genuinely snowed in creates an immediate urge to acquire provisions, regardless of need. Owners of freezers full of lamb and arders stuffed with homegrown vegetables are suddenly filled with a primitive urge to venture out like Scott of the Antarctic, foraging for frozen peas and tinned ham.

Having admired the ham, I broke to my neighbours the sad news of our not-very-immenent departure. They immediately suggested clubbing together and purchase Garden Cottage; not, as would have been appropriately touching, to present it to me, but to stop the previous occupants from moving back in.

These occupants, christened (not by their mothers, I’m guessing) ‘The Witch and the Warlock,’ were of unspecified but frightful awfulness.

‘They went off to live opposite Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’ One neighbour added ‘Next we heard, he’d sold River Cottage and moved. We knew just how he felt.’

For a micro-community (two dozen at most) we manage an impressive level of hostilities. The current blood-feud, a complex matter centring on a potential balcony overlooking a hot tub, threatens run through generations.

On into the innocent fields I stomped, the crisp new snow crunching underfoot, burying the ploughed earth and plopping in lumps off branches.

There is a mouth-watering quality in the tart crunch of deep, virgin snow. It reminds me of childhood Christmas cakes, with their scenes of Father Christmas skiing downhill through thickly ruffled white royal icing.

The skiing Father Christmas figure took advantage of the natural gradient of my mother’s homemade cakes At the bottom of the icing sugar hill, his arrival would traditionally be keenly awaited by a red plaster pillar box with a yellowing snow roof and a crusty base of last year’s icing, and a brown plastic robin the comparative size of an Alsatian.

Crunching back to the warm glow my soon-to-be-someone-else’s home, I reflected that, for me, as for skiing Father Christmas, life is full of unpredictable developments. Even in our most carefree moments, the brown plastic robin on Nemesis awaits us all.