Grappling with the graupel in an Easter Ice Station Zebra

It was obvious on Saturday that something was changing in our Hebridean weather – a certain greying of the vast skies over Lewis; a restless irritability in the wind. the Sabbath dawned chill, and grew chillier. then, as the blast built steadily from the North, came the first flurries of the white stuff, as we descended implacably into the deep freeze.

By dusk both the central heating was on and the fire piled high as – like Glenn Close, undead, exploding from the bathtub – full-on winter came snarling back. And, ever since, we have been in Ice Station Zebra.

I like snow. I enjoyed the fluffy stuff that fell between Christmas and New Year; enjoyed, too, the rich, powdery snow which lay for days in upland Edinburgh, my little dogs bouncing through great drifts of it with little whinnies of pleasure.

But this is spring. the days are fast lengthening. the clocks have gone forward. the birds are everywhere a-twitter, the geese are flying north and, such was our desperation last week for some vernal cheer after grim Covid winter, shops across Britain quite sold out of chocolate Easter eggs.

Snow would be dispiriting enough. But this is not snow. this is graupel, the granular ugly sister of sleet and snow, rather resembling the nibbed white sugar you see on shop cake.

And graupel does not fall noiselessly, in the breathless silence of Bethlehem. It comes flying at you, wave after wave in great angry curtains, pinging on your ears, slithering down your collar, in ten minutes of entire fury. then there is a lull before the wind rises again and there is another tormenting blast of it, along with the most frightful wind-chill.

ON Monday, walking the dogs is almost impossible, though I do manage three very limited outings in cold that sucks the breath from me and reduces my ungloved hands to agony – the worse when I am back indoors and they start to thaw out.

On tuesday, we are still in Ice Station Zebra and this time I fashion a pair of thick socks into makeshift mittens, which might have attracted curious glances had anyone else been daft enough to be out.

It is after four before, free of assorted duties, I can nip into Stornoway in search of gloves proper, only to find that the handful of shops attiring the stylish Lewisman about town have all closed early.

Save for Sardar’s, where after the exchange of a handful of pound coins, I leave as the proud owner of a pair of thinsulate gloves.

My Jack Russells can now be exercised in near-impunity to the elements, though on the way home on our evening walk through the latest icy hatefest, my left hand must constantly shield my left ear from yet more graupel.

I make a mental note to buy a woolly pull-on hat, even if I look like Benny from Crossroads. It would also be much less vulnerable to wind than my usual titfers. (Last Friday I had to make a painful trudge, over bog and through whins, to retrieve my prized Joe Biden 2020 baseball cap by the spooky house at the lonely road-end where, though no one is ever seen, lights occasionally show at night.)

Graupel is strange stuff. On wholly flat, clear ground it melts very quickly.

But where it is blown into drifts, against walls or fencing or rutted undergrowth, it lasts for a long time.

It is also genuinely feared by skiers and winter climbers. the weight of graupel pressing down on packed, frozen snow on high can be enough to trigger an avalanche.

Still more dangerous is a fresh fall of snow on a slope of graupel. the nasty little nibs, quite invisible to the unwary, can act like a raft of ballbearings and an entire slab of snow may slide away towards the abyss, taking you with it.

Spring snow used to be very common on Lewis.

Indeed, a gracious old man I knew on the West Side – he died in 2010, in his nineties and a surprised if pleased great-greatgrandfather – once shared two different Gaelic phrases for it: the ‘lambing snow’ and the ‘Easter snow,’ which were not the same thing.

Still vividly recalled in the run of townships from Shawbost to Borve is the incredible snow that fell, without warning and in daunting quantities, one night in April 1955.

Ross and Cromarty County Council had that winter, in their wisdom, repatriated both the island’s snowploughs to the mainland and, peering out on the waist-high drifts after this blizzard, it rapidly dawned on villagers that their situation was serious.

Even though islanders then were a much more provident generation than we are – every house had good winter stores of peat, salt herring, potatoes, meal and flour – there were only so many days the young men could face without, for instance, tobacco.

SO a posse of lads grabbed their shovels, borrowed a flat-bed lorry and – though it took them a long time, leaving in the morning and not reaching town till almost dusk – painfully dug their way through to Stornoway.

Astonished shopkeepers gladly re-opened their premises for this gallant crew and, by nightfall, they were back home with their Stornoway loaves, Golden Virginia, fresh meat, packets of tea and bottles, perhaps, of what was not tea… and why not, after all that exertion?

Decades later, their sturdy quest even inspired what remains the island’s best novel, Charles MacLeod’s Devil in the Wind – a warm portrait of what, in hindsight, was a golden age on Lewis: the secure post-War, pre-television world with modern comforts and the welfare state and the defeat of tuberculosis, but still of rich Gaelicspeaking community and where no one was lonely.

I’m just old enough to remember the last gasp of it, when most crofts still had a milk-cow and a few folk still lived in the old thatched houses; when you had to go to the well for spring water for the best tea; when little, booted old ladies in black limped out the road, Harris tweed looms went clacketyclack and soft peat smoke drifted from every lum.

And, when one of those grandmothers died, all outside work ceased on every croft till after her burial – the service conducted in her packed home, the coffin then perched outside on two chairs as the men massed for the ‘lift,’ carrying her in procession towards her last rest.

I planted a few snowdrops on her grave the other week. the stones still stand, the villages endure. I deal with her fiftysomething descendants in the third generation – but no one has a cow any more, most of the old blackhouses have been bulldozed and few bother to cut peat.

Only the land endures and those great skies above.

Much has gone that can never be replaced.