Cold Snap

I got up this morning, got ready for work, walked out the front door... and felt like I'd been slapped, it was that cold out! I wear a denim jacket lined with half a sheep worth of fleece (a Xmas present last year from my mate Jon), and I felt the cold even through that. So I walked pretty quick to work, heading through Goodland Gardens (a small park near the town centre named after a past Mayor of Taunton), and as I walked alongside the Mill Stream (so named because in Taunton's Industrial Age past, great mills sat on its banks and their waterwheels were powered by its flow), I glanced at it and thought it looked a bit odd.

I didn't think anything more of it until I got to the set of small stepped weirs at the end of the stream, where it flows down them and thence into the River Tone itself. As I neared them I could hear a sound that I couldn't identify. A crunching, cracking sound, not that loud, but at half past seven in the morning, the park was silent as a graveyard, and so it carried well enough. So I stopped, and peered over the wall and down at the first of the weirs where I reckoned the sound was coming from.

It was ice, great sheets of ice, some the size of tabletops, and most of it about an inch thick by the look and sound of it, snapping off the end of a larger sheet as the stream's slight current carried it over the weir. That was what I had noticed was odd about the stream further back, the whole stream's surface was frozen solid. I've never seen the Mill Stream freeze before. When I got into work, the front pages of the morning papers all featured news of the cold snap that had hit Britain in the night, with reports of temperatures as low as -14 Celsius in some parts of the country. My town reached about -6C or so I'm told.

There was more to come later on as snow drifted down from on high, though the ground was too wet in most places for it to settle for long. There have been estimates that this winter could break the record set in 1963 for the coldest. There was a blizzard that year. I know from the news that many parts of the country have had far worse weather than the South-West of England where I live. A few years back it was rare to see snow at all in our winters, they had gotten so mild, and even if it did snow, it would be in late January or early February, and just a light scattering of it. We've now had snow twice in the past 6 weeks, and winter has barely begun.

Memo to self: Be sure to get in plenty of food, just in case! Oh and pay the gas bill!