3 February 2008

Snow hit East Anglia early on Friday evening, just as Dot was about to go to a friend’s house for a meeting of Dangerous Women. They don’t call themselves that: I call them that. As she felt she might like to drink a drop or two of alcohol, I gave her a lift. A short drive, but interesting, with blizzard-lite conditions constantly threatening to get worse. Made it there and back OK, and fortunately she was given a lift home by one of the more spectacular DW, by which time conditions had improved.

By Saturday morning there was a fair bit of snow remaining, as can be seen on the picture, but it melted very rapidly. We stood at the bedroom window watching little avalanches of snow falling off the roofs opposite.

It was very cold still, and the road remained slippery on our little hill, so we drove to the supermarket together before returning for an InPrint meeting at our house. We discussed the future of the group, news of which will appear on the InPrint website soon, then Dot and I took Annette out to Paston for the launch of the Paston Project. This consisted of a Latin Compline in a barely heated church, lit by candles. Quite a strange experience: it felt as if we were secretly carrying out some illegal rite under cover of darkness. On the other hand, there was mulled wine and nibbles afterwards.

Making my way back to the car through a fair amount of mud, I managed to slip over, but happily without dire consequence, other than caking my coat in mud. One other unexpected result was that when we returned home (dropping Annette at Lisa’s to pick up her car) I must have got some mud from my key into the lock, because this morning I couldn’t lock it from outside. I had to lock it from inside and go out the back door, which meant in turn that when we got back after church lunch (outrageously delicious chicken) and entered by the back, the alarm went off. As I was anticipating it, I was able to disable it in seconds, so I don’t think we caused any disturbance. Afterwards I freed the lock using WD40.