Feb 8: Winter’s Finally Here

Snow! In England! Today we had what by English standards was a real blizzard: 7 cm of snow. People here are really in shock over it all. It has been the main news story for the week, trains were canceled, kids stayed home, and work was about 60% full. Though we don’t get snow days anymore, even work was buzzing with a child-like sense of mischief and fun. Above is a picture I took of the fields out behind the office. Everyone there pretty much just stared out the windows all morning, enthralled by the snow. I must have heard a dozen people say, “feel like home, Nick?”

The best for me—even better than the snowball fight we had at lunch and the snowman we made by the front door of the office—was seeing the reaction of several people on our team from southern India who had never seen snow before. It was amazing how a little snow could turn 40+ year old engineers into kids again. One guy I have been working with was late, not because of traffic, but because he spent half the morning taking pictures of his house, his car, the trees, his street, everything. It was great, he even started to walk around the office taking pictures out the windows, ignoring the strange looks he kept getting. He told me he was really surprised how “spongy” the snow was, and thought it would be like hard ice and hurt when you touched it. He saw us make our snowman and congratulated me on how we made it when I came in after lunch, like I had done a wonderful and miraculous thing. We then had a detailed discussion of what would now happen to the snowman: would he blow away, or get hard, or melt? He wanted to know how his stone eyes and mouth stuck to his face so well, and the best way to make a snowball.

It was really fun, and great to be reminded of how really and truly amazing the world is. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take this 40+ Sr. engineer out and have a good ol’ snowball fight with him.

Obviously I won’t throw my hardest.

Our street, snowified