I can't help thinking in cliches; London is so beautiful (even if inconvenient) in the snow. Road travel is slowly getting back to normal, though the Tube and trains are another story...and, of course, I generally use Tube and trains (how could it be otherwise?).
Several pictures taken in Greenwich yesterday.
The first is the front of our house, 109 Maze Hill Road. If you look up on the roof you'll see a couple of skylights...Sarah and I work up there sometimes, but it can be a chilly place, for sure.
My room is the bow window upstairs, on the left. Akash often works in the upstairs room next to mine.
This photo is the garden, from taken
from dining room patio doors. See...cliches
ARE appropriate, it IS a winter wonderland.
Not only was the house beautiful, the Royal Park was breathtaking.
A few highlights from yesterday, and today.
The Pavillion Tea House in the upper part of the Royal Park.
Crowds of sledders/sliders at the big hill.
At the bottom you can just make out the
beautiful Queen's House (Inigo Jones),
flanked in the background by the twin domes
of (Christopher Wren's) Naval College, beyond
that, the Thames.
Detrius from yesterday's innovative snow sliding inventions.
Note the inner tube (lower left), grocery bag, plastic bread delivery tray (right), and plastic storage box. Some of everything.
You might think I composed this still life, but it's just what I found. The red shard sticking up from the trash bin is the remains of a plastic saucer.
The snow has packed down on the hills from thousands of sledders over two days and is now
icy...so the sliders are going further and much, much faster...posing a real menace to photo-snapping pedestrians.
The little ankle biter nearly killed me, then ran away when I tried to snap her picture. Brat.
Rounding this out, a winter scene including The Royal Observatory and Prime Meridian, Royal Park, Greenwich.
I wonder, would do we go out and play in the snow the way Londoners did if we had less of it? Would we store a sled or toboggan for 30 or 40 or 50 years, ready for the snowy day that was VERY slow to come? The Royal Park was full of parents and toddlers, schoolkids with an unexpected day off, lovers walking through the snow, old men and women leaning on sticks, taking in the fun. The other London parks were similarly crowded.
Overheard in Greenwich:
"There's as many people here today as a hot f****g summer Sunday afternoon."
"I had already got up and got my kilt on and then my nan came in and said, Lydia, no school today! Brilliant!"
There was an entire BBC segment today on how properly to remove snow from a car (paying attention to clearing the entire windscreen, roof, boot, and bonnet of the car). The set up was a comparison with drivers in Moscow (each reputed to have a shovel, long-handled snow scraper, and a handy supply of sand/salt in their vehicles), while Londoners are woefully under provisioned vis a vis getting snow off vehicles, and getting vehicles moving out of the snow. The advice came a day after most people had cleaned off their cars. It won't likely snow this much again for another twenty years. But like CNN, BBC has to fill a 24 hours news cycle...hence lessons in cleaning off snowy cars. That segment was easier to watch than the loop of tape of people falling down icy steps outside a tube station...person after person after person. If you were holding a camera and saw one person tumble down the stairs, wouldn't you station yourself at the top of the stairs to stop it happening again? Or would you really put up your tripod, hoping for another half a dozen prospects for broken wrists and ankles? Just wondering.
The public service motif of BBC reporting did not end there. There's also the poorly understood potential risks of wearing wellies (rubber Wellington boots) to drive that the viewing public has to consider. Apparently, with feet in wellies, you can't feel the gas and brake pedals. At least that's what the Beeb guy said. I wonder if that's because your feet would be mostly frozen, unless the wellie wearer used a variation of my London boots?
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