Julie's Boggle

It’s Christmas Eve and here we are in snowy Durham.  This is a fairly significant variation in our original Christmas plans which had us leaving for York yesterday to be with our usual Christmas friends.

As it happened, they called the day before with the bad news that their water supply had been frozen in the cold!  Which admittedly is no fun at all to have to live with (even with very helpful, unfrozen neighbours) so we could hardly add our family to their complications.

Other arrangements have been made though.  We went searching for a Christmas fowl in the market yesterday and managed to acquire a good-sized duck, as well as the last normal (i.e. not sponge / luxury / extra apricots) Christmas pudding in the local Tesco.  And we had already done all our decorating at home, so now it’s just a matter of organising a Christmas dinner for our little family tomorrow, going along to Tom’s placement church for their Christmas service, and then sitting back and relaxing for a bit while Jon plays with new toys.

From Boxing Day, our Christmas plans are back on track.  (Weather permitting!)  We’re heading on over to the other side of the country to have a Boxing Day dinner with Tom’s family, and the next day we’re travelling down to London for a week – hopefully catching up with lots of old friends.  Lots to look forward to, not least of which is the celebration of the coming of Emmanuel.

So to all our family, friends and interested readers – we wish you a joyous and peaceful Christmas!

While the variations of the English language by region in the UK are not as strong as they used to be, there is still quite a marked difference between the accents that you hear in the south of the country, and those you come across further north.

I’ve done a little casual researching and there seems to be some dispute as to precisely what the local accent, here in Durham, is known as.  A bit further north in Newcastle you would call it Geordie, and over in Sunderland to the east, it’s Mackem.  And while there are people who argue vigorously that the Durham accent is one of these two, there’s still another group of people who say it’s more of a Middlesbrough accent.  Anyhoo, let’s just call it Northern for now.

Personally, I’ve not had much difficulty with understanding the locals in Durham, but the differences in how they sound was brought home to me recently by something Jon said.

We had Brian the maintenance man over to do a few things on the house, and one of his jobs was going to be filling in a hole in an exterior wall with some foam.  “I’ll just be going out to the van to get some foam”, Brian informed me.  Except that with his northern accent, he didn’t say what we’d recognise as “foam”, he said “form” or maybe “fohm” if you wanted to sound it out.

I went back to my washing up, and Jon, who’d been following Brian around ever since he arrived, hung back by the kitchen door.  Then he said “Mummy, what’s ‘fohm’?  What ‘fohm’ Brian get from his van?”

Smiling to myself, I explained that this was Brian’s way of saying “foam”.

There was a pause and I could see all this processing in Jon’s head.  Then trying out the word himself, “fohm… fohm”.

And while watching him, along came the thought that young Jon will soon be flavouring his immature accent with a sprinkling of northern…

I should confess that when I first arrived in Durham, and heard tales of the previous winter’s (heavy) snow, part of me was still thinking that it might not snow this winter.

I mean, it doesn’t always snow in London, right?  Okay, yes, it “snows” most years, but often it’s not very much and you can hardly count a centimetre or two as proper snow.  So perhaps there are years where it does that in Durham too.  And this could be one of them.

Or maybe not.

As a consequence of all this head-burying, I was rather surprised when more and more people started to talk about snow being forecast in the weather reports in late November.  It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them, but the weather people get these sorts of things wrong so often.  And this is still November, it’s not really going to snow.

But it did.

And it went on, and on, and on some more.  Snowfalls most days and every other night.  Until cars were getting stuck trying to get in and out of the courtyard of our complex, and we’d get woken up at night by loud rumbling and scraping followed by a series of wet thuds as the roof’s latest snow blanket succumbed to gravity.

Lots of fun was had on the local hillsides as adults and children tobogganed wildly down them and everyone in town pulled on their Wellington boots (wellies) before venturing out.  Everyone that is, who owned wellie boots and hadn’t been thinking that perhaps it might not snow this year.  (I did get some in the end – once we were a week into it, and local stores had had a chance to re-stock – and they helped a lot.)

In the end, it wasn’t the cold that was a problem, so much as the immovability of the snow.  It got so entrenched and packed down in the areas where it wasn’t cleared that it became really hard to drive on.  Under the surface centimetre or two of powder, was a thick layer of very hard icy stuff that car tyres battled to get a grip on.  The council applied grit but only to main roads (not even the pavements) and everywhere else people had to make do.

Most schools were closed for a week and this exacerbated the problem to some extent.  It meant that cars and minor roads got used even less, and the snow got even more chance to build up.  At Jon’s nursery, we found that the two parking areas which usually see a flurry of activity several times a day, were under a layer of snow about 10cm deep.  Only the local farmers with their 4×4′s were nonchalantly swinging in and parking there.  The rest of us were battling it out for the severely limited number of remaining parkings in the surrounding area.

(As mentioned, the courtyard of our complex’s parking area and the road leading up to it were examples of seriously entrenched snow.  A posse of residents got out one day and spent several hours breaking and levering up the icy layer covering the paving, and that made a big difference to us getting out the next week when schools re-opened.)

Taking out a pushchair was also a whole new challenge in such a hilly city.  From scaling the hard, snowy hillocks that had formed around our front doors (with narrow access trenches dug in them), to forging a path through the thick layer of loose snow on the path down to our closest road – and that was just to get to the point where you could join a road (with the cars) to avoid the icy churned-up slurry on the pavement.  It definitely made one think twice about going out.

As I write, snow is hitting a lot of the southern counties quite badly, but there’s none falling in Durham.  There’s been some predicted, but they seem to have got it wrong this time. So perhaps we won’t have a white Christmas after all, but I can’t say that I’d be unhappy. I’ve seen my winter wonderland for this year; been impressed with snowmen, igloos, and huge snow drifts (took lots of pictures – see here), and would now be just as happy with uncomplicated Christmas travel!