My last workshop of the year was scheduled to be Sunday 10th December at Guthrie and Ghani in Birmingham. It was one that I had to be 100% prepared for, as it was a new teaching project and needed a proper written pattern, as well as quite a few extra materials and demo models. However, despite working up until the Friday, I had a nagging feeling that the weather forecast was going to somewhat interfere with my plans. Shropshire was due for an 'awful lot' of snow on Sunday, starting in the early hours. When I learned that taxi companies in town were not running on Friday night, I made a difficult decision and after chatting to the shop owner, we decided to cancel. Which meant letting ten people down and losing this month's income. However on Sunday morning, we woke up to this.
Which didn't seem that bad at first, until it carried on...
and on...
The road outside was iced over and only the occasional tractor or SUV went slowly past. The county ground to a halt.
This amount of snow might seem laughable to countries who get it on a regular basis every year. However, over here, on this scale, it is a rare occurrence and we're not usually prepared for it. We had two feet of snow over 24 hours.
So in the end, I felt I had made the right decision, because even if I could somehow have reached the train station and managed to arrive at Birmingham, I would not have been able to return home, and I'm a bit too old to be sleeping on a station bench overnight. With the temperatures plummeting and the upstairs of the cottage feeling like an ice box, we did the sensible thing and camped in the only warm room, by the wood burner, where we slept each night until the rain came a couple of days later and washed most of the snow away.
