Tuesday 5 January 2010

Best snow for years


All the snow over the last couple of days reminds me of the winters when I was a teenager in the 1960's. Is it my faulty memory or was the snow really heavier and deeper back in those days and stayed around for ages. On BBC Radio Leeds this morning they announced about 250 school closures in the area because of the snow disruption. School closures - I ask you. We used to trudge for miles to get to school in the snow, sit in class with our coats on to keep warm and have snowball fights at dinner time.

I remember having a really heavy wooden sledge with metal runners - non of these lightweight fibreglass things. There was (an no doubt still is) a perfect slope on Western Flatts Park in Wortley, Leeds. We used to set off from the top of the slope (it was really a huge hill to be honest) and end up at the bottom nearly hitting the wall or going through the bushes into the back gardens of the houses that bordered the edge of the park. Then we would drag our wooden sledge back up to the top of the the huge mountain and set of down again. We spent hours doing this and had tremendous fun.