ha!

Well it’s now lunch time and we’re still waiting for this incredible weight of snow. Unfortunately last night the weather forecasters started changing things. Now the depth of snow has gone from 1-1.5 meters from 800 meters upwards to maybe a meter from 1000 meters upwards. Well I never, a thousand meters eh? Never heard of there being a meter of snow over 1000 meters before. Well well. A meter of snow over 1000 meters. How bizarre (anyone detect a slight hint of sarcasm here??) as far as i know they get a meter of snow most years. Perhaps this is special 'hazardous ' snow.

The wonderfully impartial news reported over a meter of snow at 2000 meters too. Well wtf do they expect at that height? I say impartial because fiat who are laying off 48,000 workers this Christmas for a month on reduced pay and the bad weather elsewhere in italy only clocked up a couple of minutes of telly time but the high water in the Tiber running through rome clocked up about 10 minutes. Just slightly biased. I think most people here would welcome a bit of bad weather in rome. Preferably washing away a herd of politicians’ houses. The maybe people would start to notice what has been happening for years in the outlying regions. Anyway, here it started snowing yesterday at 0600 and we have about 6 inches. Not exactly an emergency Mr. Weatherman, is it? Was it really worth all this grief? We all moved our cars down to the tarmac and we sat wondering how to get all this snow off our roof and how to plan our day and as usual, nothing. We had more snow the last time when there was no extreme weather warning and a few years ago before the climate change we regularly had double the snow we had today again without these knee-trembling weather warnings. I don’t doubt that somewhere there was a meter and a half of snow but perhaps they could be a little less dramatic with their warnings. Wolf!! Wolf!!

Now we have sleet on slushy snow and there are again trees down all over the place. It’s like living in a war movie, with the continual crack of breaking branches. The trees that didn’t go down with the winds are being bent to the ground under the weight of the snow. If it carries on like this we’ll soon be living in fields. One annoying and sad thing, the only decent mature fruit tree, our enormous damson tree which gave us all our damson jam and tummy ache for weeks has uprooted. Not surprising because it was too productive for its own good so big and full of little fruit bearing twigs. What a bummer.
Just been out assessing the damage and would you believe it one of only two oak trees we have has fallen across the road between us and the neighbour. But as I’m wet to the skin it can wait.