Snow Days

There we were on the phone on Monday night, myself and Steven and he said to me "At the first sign of a snowflake we're all going home." There's something about snow that makes us all revert back to childhood, and the hope that school might be closed because of heavy snow.

I find snow a wonderfully calming thing. There's still something magical about the big white flakes falling from heavy winter clouds, more than likely because down here in the South East of England we don't actually get much terribly often. We didn't have much on Wednesday evening, a mere half an hours worth, a couple of centimetres at most, but myself and my housemates sat and watched it fall and it really did bring a smile to our faces.

I was at university in Sheffield in the early to mid 90s. Now Sheffield is a cold high city overlooking the Peaks and rather inclined to receive large falls of rain and in the winter, snow. Now since its a city full of students (it does have 2 universities after all) allsorts of mayhem went on when it snowed. My favourite evening was in my first year. I'd been to the pub with my mate Dan (I hope he's gone on to do great things, unfortunately I lost touch with him a few years back) and we went back to his for tea and toast, as was the tradition. Our chat was interrupted by roars and screams coming from outside his room, where a huge snowball fight was going on. There was apparently a tradition of inter-hall snowball fights going back to goodness knows when, and as Sorby and Earnshaw were right next to each other, they were renowned for this. I lived at Stephenson, and we had traditions all our own, but for that night I was an honorary inhabitant of Earnshaw and soon found myself running round the grounds defending Earnshow from the Sorby boys and girls and great fun it was too. For a couple of hours we ran round flinging snowballs and having a real laugh, like the big kids we all were!

In my third year, at the start of 1996 (just as The Bluetones hit number 1 with "Slight Return") there was the hugest snowfall I've seen since my childhood. Myself and my mate Steve had been out with the Sheffield Local Group that night and after a few beers by a roaring fire (The Queen's Head was renowned for these things!) we nervously looked out at the snow that was falling hard and decided that really we ought to head back home. It took us a good hour to walk home through a blizzard of snow ( a trip that usually took 30 minutes) and by the time we got home we looked like a pair of snowmen. we walked into the kitchen and stood there for a moment of two trying to get warm again, at which point our housemate Neil looked round at us from the living room and said "I hope you're not going to drip all over the floor." Well he was always renowned for saying things that really pissed us off, but that was one of the more strange things! The next morning was wonderful. Living in a city, there was always noise, always traffic, always things going on around us, but the next day everything was still and silent. There'd been a massive fall of snow overnight and there was just no way traffic could get through the roads, so the city stopped. There were buses stuck half way up the hill to Walkley where we lived and after going out to the shops and buying some supplies for the next few days and of course the required snowball fight, we sat in the house with the gas fire roaring in the living room listening to The Beatles. Great times!

So this week's little flurry was a disappointment to us here in Longwater Road, but we're always hopeful there will be another fall soon so we can make a snowman and throw some more snowballs at each other again.