Snow

First snow of the year here in Manchester, and very disappointing too. It looked promising at first, nice big flakes and coming down at quite a rate. But as usual in this city it never lasts long. As a child I have memories of being sent home from school because of the snow and many happy afternoons spent outside building igloos, snowmen and having huge snowball fights. We always used to be able to get to the hills to go sledging, even though we weren’t able to make it to school! I say sledging, in reality it was Placcy Bagging. No-one actually had a sledge, but if you got an old fertiliser bag and sat on that you could actually go faster than sledges. Even with the advent of newer, cheaper plastic sledges I always favoured the Placcy Bag. You felt every bump and rock hidden beneath the snow, but the speed factor far outweighed that. The snow always reminds of the first time Me and Mrs Zilla spent Christmas together. We’d been going out for a couple of months and I always spent Christmas in the Lakes with my mum. I drove down to pick her up and she experienced her first Lakes Christmas. It was a great time – as we walked into the local town for Christmas Eve drinks it started to snow. Mrs Zilla had only ever experienced Manchester snow. The sheer amount and the fact it meant we were going to have white Christmas excited her. We were due to drive back to Manchester on Boxing Day, but by then we had arranged with all my old school friends to go Placcy Bagging for old times sake. A plan was quickly formulated, we would go “sledging” and then drive straight back to Manchester. It was a great day with most people throwing themselves down the hill with great abandon. Mrs Zilla as a newbie didn’t fancy a go, but she had a great time chatting to everyone and admiring our foolishness. Our aim was to reach the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill, we had checked it first of course! It was a great way for her to really get to know all my old friends from home. We carried on until dark, then retired to the local hostelry in an effort to try and dry out. Having failed in that mission, Mrs Zilla was treated to the sight of me changing out of one pair of trousers into another in the pub car park. Why it didn’t occur to me to use the pub toilets is still a mystery to me. But it still makes her laugh, the thought of me struggling to change clothes while hopping around in the snow.