The Camera Never Lies

First of all may I congratulate both the photographer for taking such lovely pictures and the technicians in charge of the website for uploading them so quickly. Almost before the snow had finished falling photographs of Fulston in the snow appeared on the front page, capturing perfectly the stillness, the tranquillity and enduring beauty of the white landscape. One only has to look at them to feel the peace that descends with the snowflakes, the crystalline perfection of winter encapsulated in every image.

And then, the reality……. It is difficult to understand quite what it is about small quantities of frozen rain on the ground that turns generally calm and sophisticated young people into uncontrollable three year old children at a pace that makes a speeding bullet appear decidedly pedestrian. Girls whose preoccupation for the majority of the year is their hair and their sense of style, boys for whom strut and swagger is paramount, descend to scraping and slinging dripping parcels of snow in the blink of an eye, assuming that the eyelids aren’t stuck together by ice deposited their by an errant snowball.

The first ritual at a school on a day when there has been even a few flakes of snow is the fielding of telephone calls enquiring as to whether the school is open. These generally fall into two categories, those delighted that education can continue and those horrified that the prospect of a day off has been dashed. Unsurprisingly the first of these tend to come from parents whilst the audible sighs and groans emanate from the younger generation of callers. Yesterday’s early morning fun was enhanced still further by the failure of the boiler in the main classroom block, necessitating a dash to Argos to purchase their entire stock of fan heaters whilst waiting for the engineers to fix the problem.

Long after the challenges of yesterday have faded from memory we will still have the images captured yesterday and may even look back with sepia tinted nostalgia at the snow of 2012. At the moment, with forecasts of a continuing freeze and what snow there is left looking increasingly unpleasant, those of us who have not regressed to early childhood are praying for rain or, at the very least, a warm wind from the west.  Roll on summer, when we can all moan about the heat instead.