Snow Business

New York in the snow just inspires one big cliche after another: a smoochy N and B reunion at the duck pond in Central Park (they could have bloody filmed it when I was there, could they?). Then there was the petit moment at the Rockefeller Centre on which I stumbled mid-shopping trip where the ice rink was empty apart from one lone couple and a couple of ice stewards hovering near the edge so it was oh-so-obvious even before he bent down on one knee, mid-snowfall, what he was going to do. Once I finished vomiting, I decided it was quite sweet and the rest of the crowd that had gathered must have been far more sentimental than I given that they all started cheering. Luckily, at least the squirrels were a little more creative--I spotted a black one in Central Park, which isn't quite as cool as the purple one reported in Metro but is definitely not PhotoShopped.

England, meanwhile, doesn't have snow cliches because it doesn't normally have snow. Even when it did snow badly when I was younger, we never got the day off school because Eavil Private Skool didn't care if our decrepit school building with its practically non-existent central heating was constantly buggered, nor that over half of the pupils travelled 20 miles or more, each way, to get there. The Mews, though, is looking slightly Dickensian, or, at least, it was until a load of builders' trucks drove through it at about 6.30 this morning. Why or what they were drilling at 7 o'clock, I really cannot say, but I was far too cold to get out of bed to scream at them.

Hyde Park was pretty too when I went running this afternoon. Well, I say running but really it was a combination of sliding, skidding, slipping and ski-less skiing. I really needed some skis or, at least, some ski poles as it was really hard to stay upright on the parts of the path that hadn't melted or cleared. Despite my still tentative knee, I managed not to fall over on the whole 45-minute route and I think I should run in the snow more often as my thighs feel like they've had a really good workout. However, the irritating, 14-year-old Italian boys were the victims of some serious Bexquisite wrath as one of their snowballs hit me squarely in the face as I moved to dodge it without falling over from the sudden change of direction. Very maturely, I swore at them in (Sardinian) Italian before scampering off, thinking they really shouldn't be smoking and snowballing.

The trains seem like they are going to be vaguely functional tomorrow, which means I am going to have to risk the journey to Nowheresville, even if it takes 90 minutes each way. The most dangerous part of the journey will certainly be getting out of the Mews in one piece, although I'm also (somewhat optimistically) planning a river run tomorrow lunchtime, weather permitting. Bring on summer!