Talk about the weather

(Just to change the subject for a moment.)

Here it's been mainly mild, as is usual on this  Gulf Streamed western coast:  some days fine and crisp like this one but more often, typically,  moist and murky.
And yet local people have been posting old photos of snowy conditions - such as we have rarely seen in 26 years here -  and reminiscing about 20th century childhood winters past. One year coastal communities had to be  supplied by sea, the roads being impassable with snow.

I happened to  pick up a selection of observations by Gilbert White, the 18th century country parson, natural historian  and diarist I've mentioned  before, and read his entries for early Januaries  in the  1770s and 80s:

January 2nd. Fierce frost, sun, deep snow.
January 3rd. Rime hangs on trees all day. Captain Lindsey's hands were frozen. [He] suffered pain all night and found his nails turned black in the morning.
January 4th. Meat freezes so hard it can't be spitted. We were much obliged to the thermometers for the early information they gave us and hurried our apples, pears, onions, potatoes etc. into the cellar and warm closets, while those who had not, or neglected such warnings, lost all their stores of roots and fruit and had their very bread and cheese frozen.
January 5th. The fierce drifting proved very injurious to houses, forcing the snow into the roofs and flooding the ceilings.
January 6th. The snow proved fatal to two or three people who were frozen to death on the open downs above Salisbury.

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Funny to think  that we now buy hot-house fruit and veg and preserve it in the fridge while folk in southern England then were trying to keep their home-grown crops warm to prevent them freezing.

Ou sont les neiges d'antan indeed. Well, we all know about climate change.

Useful thoughts to take one's mind of other concerns anyway.

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I hope everyone has seen the sequence of amazing weather pics by blippers in the Guardian newspaper.  It's here   Great publicity and well done to all whose photos were featured.

Thanks again, and apologies,  to everyone who offered me New Year good wishes and  to whom I haven't responded.