Snowfall

Central London's getting its first proper snowfall right now. It's supposed to have started in the middle of last night and now it's coming down visibly, not just a tease of flurries. I wonder if it'll stick.

My flatmate was all a-twitter (and I mean the original, non-social media meaning of "twitter") in anticipation of snow the last couple of days . She's seen snow before, but this was going to be her first snowfall in a place where she was living.

I was trying to remember what I was feeling the first time it was supposed to snow, my freshman year in Chicago, but all I remembered were a friend from Wisconsin tweaking me about using bear grease to waterproof one's boots and the crunchy texture of snow underfoot. Then I realised Chicago wasn't my first experience of snow, that I think it had twinkled at me somewhere near the Grand Canyon when I was a teenager. On the other side of time, it seems that four years of Chicago winters --- including my badge of honour: the first included a record cold day of -40ºF with windchill --- can make even the most tropics-trained person feel a little blasé about the onset of winter.

Last Friday night, it was flurrying as my cousin, her boyfriend and I scurried our way to a cosy bar for cocktails. Caught between streetlights and shadows, accompanied by the tart cold I could feel on my face, the snow looked magical, for the few minutes that it lasted.

Some friends here with a four-year-old have bought him two sledges in anticipation. Suddenly I'm thinking about making snow angels.