Call It Karma, but When Life Gives You Snow…

OK, I’ll admit it.

One of the things I was looking forward to as part of being in London for 10 weeks was leaving the bitter cold weather and snowstorms that often are part of winter in the Philly area. Not that I expected London to be a tropical paradise, but its winters seemed to be much milder.

And for a while, that’s what was happening. I secretly rejoiced when I read about temperatures back home dipping into the teens, while we were enjoying temperatures in the upper 40s and low 50s.

(What I really wanted to do was sit down at my computer and watch Action News for a few hours reporting on another snowpocalpyse to hit the Philly area, causing school closings and traffic jams and all the other nonsense associated with a major storm. And then when I had grown tired of watching the news, just head out to the local pub in just a sweater. Alas, such a scenario never happened.)

Well I guess all that wishing for bad weather back home has come back to bite me. In case you haven’t heard, we are dealing with what everyone is calling The Beast from the East (and I thought that was Nova’s men’s basketball team).

Earlier this week a storm came in from Siberia, causing record low temperatures (today was supposed to have set the ALL TIME record for the lowest maximum temperature ever recorded in the U.K.; haven’t yet heard if that happened.) And the Beast is being followed by Storm Emma…

It was an amazing thing to witness this past Tuesday. We happened to be going for a walk at the perfect time; when the Beast apparently hit London. The picture at the top of the post captures the storm moving in. Once it began snowing (apparently a very rare event in central London), you could not see anything across the Thames river. The two pictures below give you a sense of what the view is normally alike across the river and what it was like during the storm. The iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral seemingly disappeared, as did everything on the North bank of the Thames.

It was also great to see how excited, and happy, people were; everyone was taking photos; kids (and others) were having snowball fights, and one person simply lay down on the walking path and tried to make a snow angel.

And then, almost as amazing, in about 15 minutes, the sun was out, the sky was a beautiful blue, and you could see everything again. Later that night, and into the next morning, it began to snow in greater amounts, blanketing the city with a beautiful white cover.

Meanwhile, back in Philly, you’ve been enjoying some 60 and 70 degree weather days – in February!

So I guess that’s karma. And there’s only thing to do in such situations:

When life gives you snow, make a snowman.

Here’s to warmer weather, for all of us.