Timeless pleasure of sledging - 115 years ago!
WE’VE surely all had a bellyful of the ‘Beast from the East’.
Thankfully, it looks like the snow, ice, winds and frozen rain are slowly heading off to be beastly somewhere else.
Snow looks nice for about five minutes, then becomes a pain when multiple problems – some of them really big ones – kick in.
For most schoolchildren, however, the bad weather has been welcomed with glee as schools across the North East have closed by the score.
Indeed, many seem to have dragged themselves away from their Xboxes and mobile phones to enjoy playing outside in the snow.
Which proves at least some timeless childhood pleasures do remain. This charming photograph captures children sledging, somewhat incredibly, 115 years ago.
It was taken appropriately enough at Snows Green, Shotley Bridge, County Durham, during the winter of 1903.
The often dirty, industrialised world these youngsters lived in bore little relation to our own.
The Boer War, which today has slipped from living memory, was over – but the unimaginable bloodshed of the Great War was just a decade in the future for them.
The Prime Minister of the day was the weak and unpopular Tory grandee Arthur Balfour.
By way of contrast, King Edward VII – who’d been a playboy Prince during his mother, Queen Victoria’s long reign – was proving to be a popular ruler who restored the monarchy’s profile.
More than a century later, one wonders what the youngsters in our photo would have made of the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter that today’s kids take for granted.