Beginning Of The Endless Winter?

In the spirit of being less of a slacker, I have decided to resurrect my blog a bit and start posting posts again.

It snowed this morning! Not very much, as you can see, but enough to make me kind of excited. This is remarkable in that it's actually only about the second time it has snowed in Aarau since I got here, the first time being in January or so when I was off in Stuttgart visiting my friend Annette and so I didn't even notice. It snowed in Stuttgart at the time too, and all those wacky Germans were surprisingly entertaining with their endless* enthusiasm for shovelling, but it just wasn't the same as seeing the streets of my own adopted home being covered in coldness.

The snow's appearance is less remarkable in that the weather forecasts have been telling me that it would snow this week, but I seem to have embraced the meteorological scepticism of my friend Dave who refuses to believe that weather forecasting has any scientific validity at all. According to him, the weather report is to the news as homoeopathy is to modern medicine. It's also less remarkable in that today is the last day of winter (these wacky Europeans who not only have Christmas in winter and speak unintelligible garble, they also change their seasons on all manner of peculiar dates!), and obviously nature is having one last stab at some cool weather before global warming kicks in that little bit more.

Being the weather forecast sceptic that I apparently am, I spent the morning imagining that this might be the beginning of some sort of quasi ice-age, The Day After Tomorrow-style, and I became vaguely concerned about all the flowers that have been blooming lately (this in spite of the fact that Reto, who apparently has much more experience with European winters than I do, said this morning while he was eating breakfast and I was being giddy with delight, "it'll all be gone by lunch time"). It has been ludicrously summery here for the last week or so (so much so that I have even at times reverted to my "summer weight" coat and scarf, and once Reto and I ate lunch outside and even got annoyed by the glariness and warmth of the sun) and there are cherry blossoms and daffodils and assorted other unidentifiable flowers galore all over the place. I consequently spent this morning walking around town kicking snow off said daffodils, thinking that if they were not bowed down under the weight of it all they might survive that little bit longer and continue to bring joy and colour into what will undoubtedly turn into some sort of endless winter and possibly the end of life as we know it. Z For Zachariah-style, perhaps (not that there were any daffodils in that as far as I can remember, but I think the general vibe of post-apocalyptic destruction and death is what I am thinking of).

Anyway, by lunch time all the snow was gone. Sigh.

* I was only there for a few days, so possibly "endless" is an unreasonable exaggeration