Snow!

We'd managed remarkably well with the weather this year, avoiding the worst of one snowstorm after another.  Until Friday.

It started to snow before 9.00 am, and came on really heavily about 3.00 pm, after which we had nightmare conditions until at least 11.00 pm when I looked out just before going to bed, to find it was still thumping down.  For a while it was so bad that we couldn't get a satellite signal for the tv, and had to open the back upstairs window very wide, lean out at a precarious angle clutching an old roll of wallpaper, and poke the worst of the snow off the satellite dish.

By Saturday morning we'd had somewhere between 6 and 8 inches and for a while at least, until they got the snow ploughs through mid-morning, Windermere was cut off.  Although we drive a 4x4 now, we took one look at the roads and said "Oh, bugger that,", and set off on foot.  The pavements were horrible; lots of people had had the same idea so they were already well-trodden, compacted and very, very slippery.  But we made it down the hill as far as our favourite cafe, called in for a coffee, and trudged back again.

By Sunday it was thawing fast, so we risked a trip to the supermarket in Kendal.  On the way, the main road was littered with cars which had simply been left, some of them slewed across the road where they'd obviously lost all traction, or all patience, or both.  I've since heard that over a hundred cars were abandoned in the ten mile stretch between Windermere and Kendal; someone joked that "most of them were BMWs".

It's all gone now, thank goodness, and we're back to normal for the region - sloshing rain on Saturday night and more forecast, plus gales, for later on today.