before you reach the first marker

Although it was quite nice yesterday it was even better today. A little bit of ice and a wee sprinkle of snow had turned into a nice big thick dump of snow, covering all the rooftops visible from the bedroom window and thickly covering all the cars and the street outside, including occluding the headlights of the few going past not nearly as gingerly as I would have liked them to, nor as I would have been had I been driving them, which I would not have been, presuming their need to be driven to be significantly less urgent than would be required to be required.

I had to pop to a shop to pick up some things to further attend to the tenants' needs so took the wingpiglet out in the pram. By the afternoon the pavements were mostly slightly-re-iced footpring-shaped knobbliness but I can usually walk about on ice with my hands in my pockets without slipping and having a pram to lean on meant it was possible to go at a reasonable pace, though small ski attachments for the wheels would have been better seeing as they appeared to only be rolling out of politeness rather than because they were restricting the direction of movement. It was a slightly bumpy ride but this merely meant that the pram's contents was able to hum to himself with ready-made vibrato.

I popped out again later to take another weeks' worth of shirts to work and to check that the routes I usually use were passable, which they turned out to mostly be. Despite the impediments of a bunch of highly-amusing children chucking some snowballs at me shortly after I set off and the slush from the road gradually sticking to my tyres and accumulating beneath the mudguards and around the brakes I got in without taking more than five minutes more than usual and back down with a detour round some of the more interestingly snowybits, only slightly impeded by the snow obscuring the cycle signs which meant that the cycle side was as footprint-mottled as the foot-side and that several snow-lumps had been created on the cycle side of the path. I missed all the snow last year when my bike was living in a cupboard but was partly glad that it escaped the beating the moving parts would have taken from the slush which ended up sticking to various bits in surprisingly large quantities by the time I got home, though I'd seen it accreting on the front of my lights when heading back round the side of the hill. The tips of my feet remained dry though water was creeping in from around the ankle-opening, and my gloves (which failed slightly in anything more than moderate cold two years ago) were losing it a bit around the little fingers but (over the distances involved) everything seemed quite fit for use for getting to and from work and shops and generally pootling around, should the snow stay.