Icy flakes that warm all hearts

I CAN’T remember the first time I saw snow but according to my mum, I’ve been a life-long fan.

Growing up in London, a visit from the white stuff was a bit of a rarity and even a very light dusting would be cause for a trip to the nearest big hill with the best-kept sledges you’d ever have seen.

This weekend my mum was on “snow watch”, sending hourly updates to the family Whatsapp group, with no-one having the heart to tell her that what she was documenting was very much sleet and that it was no surprise she couldn’t collect enough icy water to make a snowball. But then I was doing the same. It’s up for debate whether my fondest memories of making snowmen or sledging are based in concrete fact or peppered with some rose-tinted nostalgia – but in my mind we had feet of the stuff in South East London, the Thames froze over and we all went skating.

OK maybe, the last two memories were straight from a tea-stained history book.

In truth, the only snow day I can vividly remember from school was when I wasn’t a pupil myself but worked in the office as an admin assistant in my very early 20s.

The daily commute across the Big Smoke was a chunky 90 minutes each way and included a walk, a train and the Tube.

I made it as far as the walk.

The roads were empty and I could barely see three feet in front of my nose. The trains were flat out cancelled for hours and buses were terminating at every other stop.

After an hour or so of “trying” to get closer to work, I gave up, went back to my parents’ and enjoyed a good old-fashioned snow day.

Of course, back then we didn’t have office systems we could log on to or work laptops. So instead I remember walking around the common enjoying the crunch of the snow beneath my feet.

It was a feeling I got to experience in HD when I ventured to Canada three years ago for two weeks in February.

It was cold and oh, so snowy – and I’m really not exaggerating when I say it looked just like Narnia. Children really did skate on the river and it took at least five minutes to de-layer for a coffee stop.

Snow makes everything a little more magical, and so yesterday was a good day.

And goodness knows, we need those.