Snow White

I....

I feel drained....

Work was fine today - busy - but fine. Catching up on stuff I missed yesterday, running around like a blue arsed fly. Emotional too.

I got to leave early and returned to my icy street.

Weather in Cornwall always amazes me. We are a loooong peninsula sticking out South West to collect the Gulf Stream with all it's warmth and rain. Depending on the direction of things, the weather here varies. We have a backbone of granite with spiky hills, topped with weathered blocks and moorland. Weather gets stuck on them, literally, clouds condense and form rain all over them. These hills trap the weather in a way as well. Raining on the South coast? Go to the North coast instead. I look up and quite often you can see the edge of the weather above.

At the end of the peninsula there are two toes - The Lizard is the Southerly toe and Penwith is the westerly toe with Land's End. Quite often the weather on the toes is different to that on the North or South coast....

The biggest hill is called Brown Willy and is found on Bodmin Moor. Bodmin Moor catches the worst of the weather, because of it's height. Unfortunately / fortunately it acts as a bit of a barrier. Being long and thin, Cornwall has one really good road, the A30, and a handful of decentish A roads that are much, much slower. The A30 goes straight over Bodmin moor. If it snows anywhere in Cornwall, it is generally there. If Cornwall is going to get cut off, it is Bodmin Moor that will do it.

but well, the strange geography of Cornwall mean that the weather can always surprise you. It can change pretty quick, it can do odd things. Weather is very local down here. One friend told me that one day it was raining at the front of her house, but not at the back.

I was talking with a driver today. His gaffer told him that there was blizzards in Cornwall. He got all the way to Devon with out seeing more than a sprinkling. To many people Devon is out of the way but there is still many a mile from there to here.....

He got to Bodmin Moor, a sprinkling again, but nothing that caused any difficulty, nothing at all. He was a bit bemused by this point. On he came, Roche and his gaffer called and said, they are shutting early due to weather, will you get there by 4? You best turn back. The driver looked around him at the lack of snow, less than an hour from arriving.

He kept on, and all of a sudden, he reached the top of a hill and there it all was......

This snow seems to have come from the West and is worse the further West you go. Normally it is warmer the further west you go, and wetter. Not colder and more frozen.

One colleague at work was, it seems a bit snide about my inability to get to work yesterday, because someone else form the same town got in. But they lived lower down the hill, closer to the big main road, the right side of town not to have to go through it, did not see the gridlock surrounding my home.... Work today and the roads cleared nicely throughout the day. A few miles away, my street is icebound and treacherous and unmelted, even at the end of the day. The hill that steepens suddenly next to our house is only for the brave! (on foot or by car)

I have seen photo's from Penwith taken in the last few days and they look like they have even more of the white stuf than we do. The only thing I think that makes it a little less treacherous is the white stuff has stayed whiter and not half melted there. But boy, does it look beautiful!

This is so odd for Cornwall, which has odd weather by most peoples standards.... And Snow with thunder and lightning? I don't think any of us remember that before! Is it common in other places?