Winter Has Arrived

A fellow blogger, Jon Doust who writes in the Telegraph and who lives in south western France was complaining yesterday, that just like the UK, the merest dusting of snow in his area causes chaos with the roads unpassable, lack of provisions in stores, closures of schools and the like. You can read Jon Doust’s Blog here : http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/jon__doust

I looked at the forecast for our area. It was for light rain yesterday (Tuesday) but light rain/snow for today and that seemed to be reasonably accurate as it was obviously getting colder by the hour (we tell how cold it is by the thickness of the icicles hanging from Shadow’s whiskers). True enough – rain fell yesterday and then it got heavier and then it turned into soft hailstones which fell for a few hours and covered the ground in what, to any eye would look like snow.  

Then the phone calls started. School was being evacuated, not because of the snow fall in town but because some pupils live in the mountains and those pupils needed to get home before the conditions got any worse.

Now, the logical mind would question at this point why the school doesn’t just let those ‘mountain’ pupils go home and continue to educate the others. I’m afraid that’s just too simple a solution for the French education system. Nope – the school is emptied, several hundred kids are thrown onto the streets and then mums, dads and various other adults have to leave work or disrupt what they’re doing just to go and pick up the kids. The buses which would normally transport them to and from school, lie idle in the depot miles away. It’s crazy. 

And so this morning, Kitty came in to the bedroom at 6.30am asking if she had to go to school. The dilemma was that we could take both her and Guy the 8 miles to school, only to be turned away at the gate. It doesn’t take much for French teachers to stop teaching and a sprinkling of snow comes high up on the list. Other reasons include the fact that it’s the 2^nd Friday in the month, a Saint’s birthday, the sales are on in Cap 3000 (the mall) or they just can’t be bothered. C’est la vie!  

I got up and peered into the darkness. It looked like just another ‘normal’ wet morning, not that the weather has been foul recently. It was only on Sunday that J spent the best part of the afternoon sitting in the sun on the terrace but it does change quickly and indeed, the forecast is for ‘sunny weather’ from tomorrow onwards. We’ll see.

Anyway, up there in the darkness on the top of the mountain, I thought I could see ‘whiteness’ (see picture) and was just about to relay my advice that the kids should stay off school when Kitty wandered past me in that ‘zombie-like’ state children adopt before noon – and she went straight back to bed. It looked to me that a decision had already been taken!