It snowed here as well. Started last night and was still snowing when I came to work, but has stopped now. Probably about 2 inches total. This is not unusual for this area (Ottawa, Canada - world’s second coldest capital city), nor is the fact that it will quickly melt, as the temperature will be back up to 10ºC by Friday. “Real” snow, that falls and sticks around, can be expected anytime from early November to late December (I’ve seen a couple of green Christmases).
I just hope it isn’t like last year, which just missed breaking the record for most snow, and for a good part of which my snowblower was out of action.
My family was posted to a base just outside of Brackley, England, between 1968 and 1972. That’s a bit north of London, sorta kinda midway between Oxford and Cambridge.
My memory says we had a fair bit of snow one winter; my dad insists (with some asperity) that we had snow every winter. I don’t remember which months it was in, though.
We wrapped up a Washington D.C. vacation yesterday and were amazed at how much things could change and then change back again from day to day. I must say that the fall colors, overcast, often rainy skies and markedly cooler temps were a welcome respite from what we’re used to. Not that we’d still feel that way though were we to have visited too much later.
It’s not all that unusual to get a few late flurries of snow in the higher areas of NSW through into spring. The best fall of snow my mother has ever had has actually been in early November.
1968/69 - white Xmas in many parts, snow in Feb too
1969/70 - heavy snow in March
1970/71 - another white Xmas
1971/72 - doesn’t look like there was much snow but a very cold snap in January.
Of course, British winters were generally quite a bit colder in the 1960s. The 1990s and 2000s have mostly been terrible for snow lovers.
I’ve noticed a lot of people from outside the UK seem to think we have cold winters (after all even the southern UK is further north than, say, Winnipeg). But we really don’t, despite all the snowy Dickensian scenes on Christmas cards and in BBC period dramas. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, though, statistics do show that it was much snowier.
