Last night just before dusk we took a walk in the nearby park. (Got to try to get the lingering Christmas weight off somehow.)

Underneath one of the trees I spotted some snowdrops. It fair cheered me up.

Perhaps winter may be coming to an end.

Well Christmas has been and gone, and my birthday just before it.

We had both boys, plus the younger’s girlfriend, with us for a few days. A nice family time. Among other things as presents I got a few more tins for the collection; mainly containing biscuits.

Yesterday I was van driving again, the road and the miles to Dundee. Not to mention humphing furniture flat packs up two flights of stairs at the other end.

I can barely move today.

So there’s not been much time for posting.

There has also been a full scale thaw.

I see that there has been transport chaos in England today. Roads and airports have been closed and motorists have been stranded in their cars overnight.

I trust that Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray and high profile Scottish Tory David McCletchie will now be demanding the resignation of the relevant UK Minister as obviously he (or she, I’ve no idea who has that responsibility, if anyone) is to blame for this totally avoidable occurence.

I’m sure there was something I was meant to be fretting about this afternoon…..

But I can’t quite remember what that might have been.

My workplace was badly disrupted by the recent snow but the surroundings were lovely when we resumed on Tuesday.

I was a day too late taking these photos. The trees still had snow on them on Wednesday but I’d forgotten the camera. By Thursday it had fallen off.

I took all these from inside so you can see reflections of lights in the window glass.

This is a view to the main road (all but blocked by abandoned cars for most of the week.) The jannies* had done a great job clearing the car park.

Snow had fallen from the higher roof here onto the lower one causing a lot of damage.

There were some nice icicles hanging around.

The Christmas tree looks a little forlorn here. There is actually a pond in this picture.

A couple of courtyards now. The first has some snow covered pergolas. By Friday all the snow had gone.

*Scottish diminutive for janitor. For those from the south who don’t know what one is a janitor is a caretaker.

Hey, guys.

Though I must admit I would not have liked to be stranded overnight in a frozen up car…..

It’s Scotland.

It’s winter.

It snows. Vehicles get stuck.

Get over it.

(And have a bit of patience.)

We took a walk around a bit of the park on Saturday. Unlike last January when there was all sorts going on on the frozen pond the place was almost deserted apart from the seagulls and geese.

Even the play park, normally well used, was empty.

Here’s where the only evidence of free water was in January.

No convocation of birds this time. They were all (well some of them) up the other end.

Beveridge Park’s two resident swans are in this one. There has been a third swan on the pond for most of this year; we don’t know whether it’s the offspring of these two or a blow-in.

This is the fountain I pictured all iced up last year. It’s not quite so picturesque at the moment but from this angle you can see the building that used to be a park keeper’s house in the background.

We were back up in Dundee on Friday taking more stuff to the flat our son has bought.

The weather was still interesting.

Above is the block of flats where his flat is, below is the entrance road.

That’s where the van got stuck on Tuesday. Here you can still see the ridges in the snow/ice:-

This is where you would normally park:-

The access road is lined with tenements. There were some great icicles hanging from one of them but the picture didn’t come out too well.

The main roads were fine, though.

I’ve remarked before that it’s not often we get a lot of snow at Son of the Rock Towers but like the rest of the country we haven’t escaped this winter’s early deluge.

Despite that we had a visitor. Well, our garden did.

Here it is, showing as a backdrop the first (relatively trivial in hindsight) snowfall.

I don’t recall ever seeing a snipe before but we looked it up in our Wildlife of the British Isles book and it was exactly like the illustration there.

Snipe are wading birds. We’re only a couple of hundred yards as the snipe flies from the sea here so perhaps it’s not surprising to see one. It was grubbing about in the snow – for food I suppose, maybe there’s not much down on the shoreline at the moment – but it had measly pickings. It was there just long enough for me to rush upstairs for the camera and to get the one pic.

Yesterday we moved some of our elder son’s stuff to his new flat in Dundee. We just moved son no. 2 out of Dundee in the summer and now the other moves there. Isn’t life strange?

I was driving the van. That was fun. We couldn’t get near the ground entrance to the flat so were humphing stuff through twenty metres of snow. Then the van was reluctant to come out of the iced up snow and had to be dug out. South of Dundee on the A92 on the way home it began snowing again. I could barely see where the road was.

Still, not a scratch on the van despite a few slips and slides at roundabouts – including one 165 degree skid on exiting one! The snow/slush caused that but also saved me from damaging the van as it gave a soft place for the skid to end up. We ended up facing completely the wrong way blocking that exit. It must have been entertaining viewing for the folks in the vehicle waiting to get onto the roundabout at the previous exit. I just drove back onto the roundabout and went all the way round. More carefully.

Eight or so more inches fell overnight so it was a bit tricky this morning getting the van out of where it had been parked in front of the house but once on the road I got it back to the hire place OK. The main routes are ploughed and gritted but not our street. We also had no bin collection today. Next one’s in a fortnight!

Motoring to the game yesterday I couldn’t help notice that the Ochil Hills had snow on them.

First snow of the season. And it’s still October. The clocks haven’t even changed.

Even if it had disappeared by full time (much like any hope of staving off relegation) another long hard winter may be on the way.