Before the curtains open, before my eyes open, it is my ears that try to detect what the weather is doing. The hard slick of tyre on wet tarmac, the push of wind between window sashes. The presence of snow can be heard in the absence of sound. A tell-tale dampening of noise, as if the ground had been covered in egg boxes, rather than frozen water. 

Sound, and light. When the ground is white - and the sky - a dull new brightness emerges. This morning I thought both lay beyond the curtains, but opened them to find red skies instead. Shepherd’s warning. 

The snow arrived with breakfast. I boiled the water for the eggs and the rain was slower, thicker than usual. As I gently patted the cloudy yolks the flakes were fat and mesmerising. Childish excitement tussling with the slow breath of wonder. 

It was settling, and fast. The top of the brick wall turned grey, then white; the blurry edges of the beds and the lawn daubed over. By noon, a good inch and a half covered most things solid enough to hold it. A bleached backdrop for the red of a fox who trotted with indignation from one corner of the garden to another. I go out in it and catch flakes on my eyelashes, my nose, the wool of my cuffs. I film the flakes fall. How magic it feels.

Takes a while for me to think about the plants. I pull the nasturtiums in, a job that should have been done weeks before but they’ve resisted frost so far, mostly because our walled garden has, too. Mostly, it seems, the snow makes the green shoots look somehow stronger. They’ve withstood squirrels and sog. The chill will introduce a kind of dormancy, and they’ll wake up again with the warm. Beneath the soil, those that have been waiting for the cold - the tulips, mostly - will have received it. Messages of temperature and time working their way through the ground.

As for the others, I’m more curious than anything else. Frost is, increasingly, an absent thing here. I see the hoar frost of the countryside through little squares on my phone, the crisp glitter that turns an ivy leaf into a marvel, and sometimes think about the icicles that used to hang off the low roof of my childhood home. But here, the only thing that gets properly frozen is the car windscreen. It’s concerning and sad, mostly, even if it makes growing things a little easier.

We’ll see as to what will happen to the more temperate plants that are now laden with snow. The asparagus ferns and the maidenhairs, the supposed houseplants that get so crispy and miserable in the house that I have long pushed them outside and watched them flourish through our dingy winters. I suspect I shall lose some and be surprised by the hardiness of others. So it goes. 

The first snow in our first home. The first I’ve seen in London in three years. It feels rare and somehow heavy; I’m conscious that our warming planet has made them so. Perhaps later we will wrap up and go out in it, before it turns brown and wet with tomorrow’s sunshine. But for now I watch it through the windows, thighs against the radiator, letting go of the little control we have.  

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