The Snow - personified here because it seems to take on a personality of its own. Just as January 24th approaches with the credit bills spilling through the letterbox, the snow arrives. For some this means a trip to tax dictating Starbucks, to sit there all day with a newspaper and iPhone and spend the day catching up with people you caught up with yesterday. Not for me. The leaking roof of six months means a fresh supply of towels every hour as the water dribbles through the gap between the ceiling and the wall. My room? No. My brother’s. He has a bad back and cannot get out of bed, especially as he only arrived home in the early hours of the morning and a headache now accompanies the bad back. He thinks if he ever gets out of bed he may never walk again, so I am left no choice but to do it. Four floors up and four floors back down to the dryer. I’ll lose some weight. Maybe I’ll pretend to do it – just turn the towels over now and again. Maybe I’ll just do it. Thank you, Brother Number 3.
Brother Number 2 is at University in Egham... I assume no news is good news and am yet to hear if he has been affected by the snow. Knowing him, he will be hungover and will not have looked out of the window yet today.
Brother Number 1 keeps phoning. He lives in London. One of the cats has been run over, leaving the brother cat on his own, and he needs to talk about it. Actually he needs counselling. His partner won’t get out of bed and he thinks his one year old daughter might need to see a therapist who deals in Feline Deaths. My Mother, whose tax return is due in by the 31st January, asks if I can deal with him, and when I have time can I check her figures against bank statements. She’ll go to prison, she says, if I get it wrong so it’s really important I do it properly.
Sister Number 1 wants to go bum boarding and no-one will take her, and if we don’t go the snow will be melted and her whole life will be ruined because her whole class will have been except her. She’s 12. Up we get, off we go. My Dad comes with me, back from Madrid where he works. The cafe at the park, like the whole country, is closed. So we watch while she screams and we put up our thumbs every time she shouts, ‘are you watching?’
My Dad wants to tell me again about the chaos at Gatwick and the total incompetence of British Rail for what should be a 27 minute train journey turn into a three hour trek with three different trains and some buses in between. And not a drinks trolley in sight. He’s Finnish. Finns live in snow, in fact they invented it. Finns do not break down when 8cm of snow fall from the Finnish Heavens. All I want to do is tell him about my first week as a trainee journalist, how I coped with the dreaded shorthand, the lovely people I met and how I'm on the lookout for exciting stories and how these stories could be bought by the Argus... ‘...and the train was going 30 miles an hour, I was freezing cold and there was no heating and no drinks trolley...’
We return and my mother is pondering in front of the Millennium Cupboard. Created in 1999 as the result of an absolute conviction that the world would end at midnight on 31st December of that year, it has changed name with each impending crisis. Today it is her Snow Cupboard; full of both full fat and semi skimmed long life milk, candles, Coffee-Mate and bottled water. She asks if we’re hungry and if we would like a nice long-life hot chocolate to warm us up. Oh, and Brother Number 1 has phoned, she says, and they’re waiting for the cat’s ashes.................
Tea and sympathy after a long week.
