This morning I woke to about a centimetre of snow lying outside. Typical, I thought. My week for the car.

As soon as I had scraped the windows and lights, got 50 metres from the house and onto a bus route it was all salted away, though. No hold ups, no problem. Work as usual.

It was just about all gone when I got home again. Ah well.

I don’t know why it is but I always seem to have less time for doing stuff when I am on holiday.
Partly this is because I set the alarm for later and tend to have a lie-in (note: this is never called a lay-in, even the tin-eared do not say that) beyond the time it goes off.
I also relax and mooch around a bit.

It’s worse at Christmas and New Year, though, because the time always gets taken up, by last minute shopping, making sure we have enough milk and bread etc for the two days the supermarkets are closed for – only one day over New Year this year, surprisingly – and visiting family and the like.

So today it was back to work and it didn’t feel like I’d had a holiday at all. (I’m not asking for sympathy; I know shop workers had even less time off than me.)

On a cheerier note, the sky was brightening when I left the house, not something I could say was true of any time in December, so the mornings are certainly progressing in the right direction.
It was icy underfoot, though, not a typical occurrence outside Son Of The Rock towers. it had warmed up by the time I got home but tonight looks icy again.

It also snowed during the day in Dunfermline, but only a little. This made the surroundings brighter and cheerier. All that white on the rooftops seemed clean, somehow, and the air was clear. I could almost feel summer a-coming in.

(I suspect a lot more postponements between now and then though. They will cost us.)

So, it begins.

Today’s postponement might be a one-off, but from here it looks like a long, hard winter. The frost didn’t lift all day in my back garden – and we’re not prone to much in the way of frost here – and its been a cold, cold week all in. We’re only just in December.

If we win on Tuesday night, that’ll be the home game on 10th Jan postponed as well.

If this cold weather continues – and we’re not really used to prolonged cold spells any more – rearranged fixtures could cost us; they have before.

Woke up this morning to snow on the ground in Kirkcaldy. It was more or less gone by one o’clock, though.

I remark on this since, in all the twenty years I’ve lived in this house, there has been less than a handful of times – this morning included – snow has actually lain for any length of time. (Note, here, the past participle of to lie, and not of to lay.) Only once was there ever enough snow for my sons to build a snowman or go tobogganing in Beveridge Park – which is just over the railway line from our street.

Partly this is because we live reasonably close to the sea and the temperature is therefore always slightly higher than just a hundred metres or so inland and so we rarely get snow. It is noticeable that the snowline generally starts a bit up Oriel Road. Its higher elevation as well as more distance from the Promenade helps explain that.

In my youth in Dumbarton snow was also relatively unusual – it used to start where the Clyde narrowed at Old Kilpatrick and the warming effect of the river lessened.

This did not of course apply in the winter of 1962-3 which was famously severe and during which I actually stood on Loch Lomond. I believe this was itself not a patch on the winter of 1947, which was in addition made to seem worse by the austerity of those post-war years, my father told tales of folk burning old shoes as fuel – but I wasn’t around then.

Otherwise I do not recall snow falling, and lying, before New Year, except once.

It’s still November and a week to go before December, at least five before New Year. A harsh winter ahead? In August I noted an early onset of leaves going brown.

I remember reading somewhere in the early autumn that the weather patterns in Britain this summer resembled those of 1962 and that such patterns had a tendency to repeat themselves after gaps of years.

Just what we need! Credit crunch, banking collapse, the world financial system tottering around our ears and a possible harsh winter. (You read it here second.)

During a break at work yesterday I noticed the leaves on one of the trees outside were turning yellow.
It’s still August!
There were more trees like this on the way home, and even more today when I travelled to Perth and back.
I don’t remember trees turning so early before.
After a not very warm summer – the second in a row – maybe I was more sensitive to it but this was dispiriting.
Just goes to show the Scottish weather is totally bizarre.
Only two years ago I took in the delights of Gayfield (note to that American Christian website; it is not Homosexualfield) on the last Saturday of October to see Dumbarton achieve their now traditional draw there. And it was warm.
Before this I’d never been warm in Arbroath in my life!