Rather startled this morning to find when I open the wooden shutters in my bedroom that the world has turned white once again. I cannot remember any other time in my life in which it would have been possible to say by this stage in January “It’s snowed every Wednesday this year”.
If I had the vaguest notion of how to go about it, I would be tempted to dash down to the nearest betting shop and put a wager on next Wednesday’s weather. The odds against it snowing again would have to be tremendous and therefore the potential winnings vast. If only I’d thought of this last week.
I wonder whether it’s a new and unexpected pattern of global warming emerging. Wintry every Wednesday, thunderstorms on Thursdays, frost on Fridays, sunshine for Saturdays. That degree of predictability would be dead handy.
“If it’s snowing, it must be Wednesday.”
There’s something very comforting about sweeping statements, and it strikes me that January is rather a good month for them. Plenty of people would be able to say, hand on heart, a week or two into the month, that they have been completely sober all year long. Ask them again on, say, Valentine’s Day, and you would hear barely a murmur.
On January 3rd, I was able to complain with conviction “This year has been awful so far, we’ve had to make an emergency dash to the doctor’s every single day”, thanks to a virus that sent my daughter’s temperature high enough to melt any snow within a substantial radius. Glad that particular sweeping statement soon ceased to be valid.
