Britain braced for more snow

I got a phone call from my friend in New Zealand the other day. She was gloating about the fact that she was nice and brown but it was snowing here in the UK. "How do you know it's snowing here?" I asked. "It was on the news" she said...

I can't believe 'country in northern hemisphere experiences winter weather' actually makes the news in New Zealand - must be a slow news day down there I suppose.

It has been snowing a lot here though - more than I remember for a long time, but far less than I'm used to from my childhood. In Yorkshire in the north of England we used to laugh at how a few centimeters of snow in the south would bring everything to a standstill and be headline news. I remember one February walking to work in a blizzard and falling into a snowdrift. Bloody namby pamby southerners don't know what hardship is...
A colleague was telling me the other day that his children have grown up never experiencing making a snow man - it really has got noticably milder in Britain in recent years, which I think is why we're complaining about 'normal' weather for the time of year. Funny to think in four weeks it should be warm enough to sit in the beer garden in a t-shirt. I love that first beer garden moment of the year. (As I burn really easily it's the only part of the summer I can really enjoy without regretting it 20 minutes later!)

The odd thing about this cold snap is that despite all the snow, none of it has settled in Brighton. Yet up the road people are sledging and getting snowed in, trains are being cancelled and schools are being closed. The only place I've seen it settling is on the cat, who got very excited at her first snowfall on Sunday. I spent a while wthcing her through the window trying to catch the snowflakes and being rather confused as they disappeared. All the while she was getting whiter and whiter as more landed on her and stayed.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Britain braced for more snow: "It's not unusual at these times for people in northern Britain to complain that southerners whinge about their bad weather when the north of the country suffers far worse conditions on a regular basis.

There may be some truth in that, said Wayne Elliott, a meteorologist at the Met Office, but he added that in fairness the cold wind off the North Sea made conditions in Kent raw, bitter and extremely unpleasant. Mr Elliott said the cold snap was entirely within the normal range for the UK in March. It seems we have all been softened up by a mild winter that has been on average 2C above normal for the whole country."