inclement weather

Last night the winds colliding just under Adam's window, at the corner of King's Parade and Benet Street were blowing so hard the snowflakes lost their sense of gravity and all snowflake decorum. They floated in spirals and whirlpools so it all looked like a particle simulator. They crashed against the glasses of many rooms which were lit in the middle of the night whose inhabitants had left their coffee go cold at the desk by an unfinished paper and had stuck their pale faces and ther camera lenses to the window to marvel at the event.

We ran outside to make snow angels, snow fight and run around the forbidden grass. There were already about 50 people and as we left more came to keep up the enthousiasm. True, this would be a complete non-event in Bulgaria as Fiona pointed out, but here even her northern blood caught some of the fascination. It's such a fairy-tale site - the multicentennary colleges' stones covered with a layer of icing.

This morning snow was a different affair.

"The A2/A4 heritage lecture today at 12 noon has been cancelled due to the inclement weather and will be re-scheduled at a later date."
Natasha hopes you all see this message in time and apologises for the inconvenience.

The fairy-tale sight completely paralysed the town. People precariously step along the pavements, as if they're made of glass. The bus was driving slower than my bike.

In the rush hour before 9, the whole traffic was in slow motion. The bike-shop was full of fresh accidents.

As pathetic and funny as this is to me, it means people do not know how to move through snow. We are losing a kind of kinesthetic knowledge and the ability to take care of ourselves in changing conditions. We are becomming prisonners of our comfort zones and fears, living in symbiotic dependency with our overheated houses, shells of plastic and asbestos that will not last functional for long but will remain a fossil for our civilisation.

This goes for snow but also for unmeasured political correctness, fire hazards and all the bloody infuriating handicapping fears of this risk-obsessed society. Disciplining fears spread along a capiliary network of peer pressure and mould every individual to conform to the group's unreasonable amplified anxieties. OK, rant over.

40 years ago children skated to school along a frozen river Cam. What would it be like in 40 years when snow is even more rare than now? We will have aged more than we should, because we suffocate our planet and our sense of wonder.