Edinburgh Drift
Today is the kids’ first day back at school since last Tuesday, after a Siberian weather system swept over Britain and blanketed Edinburgh with the most snow we’ve seen since 2010. It was unusual snow for us, too: dry and powdery, Rockies-style. Good skiing weather, if we only we could have got the car out of its snow-covered side street and driven to the hills.
It didn’t feel particularly cold once the wind dropped, but the whole place ground to a halt. It snowed for a few days in January, too, but that was fine—the kids went to school, we went to work. This time, not only were the kids off school for three days, but my university closed early on Wednesday and stayed closed for the rest of the week. I can’t remember it ever closing because of snow before.
For a few nights our street was deathly silent. We live on two bus routes, but didn’t see any until Saturday.
Our garden in the small hours of Friday morning.
We shovelled the pavement outside our flat for the first couple of days, and then spent half the weekend shovelling all along our block and the next, as nobody else seemed to be doing it. Leaving it in place risked a major ice hazard if the temperature dropped again. But as it turned out, today it’s warmed up, and everything is finally melting.
This video was a hair-raising reminder of why it wasn’t worth trying to drive anywhere in these conditions. Especially knowing exactly where it was filmed, as I’ve been driving my daughter home from football training along that road over the winter.