Snow Days

As we left for our Sunday brunch at the seaside it began to snow.

Angry looking storm clouds at sea, proved what the forecasters had predicted--there was a southerly storm brewing.

The white on the sand dunes is snow - proving snow to low levels was correct!

Deteriorating conditions on the way home.

And a poor view from the supermarket carpark, as we stocked up on frozen food - a good day to shop for frozen food no chance of it melting on the remaining way home.

Couldn't see across the valley as the snow and hail fell.

So we spent the afternoon indoors.

In front of the fire.

Day two dawned and all the snow had turned to ice - so we stayed home again. It's been sunny, but the white stuff is not melting very quickly. The steep icy hills make Dunedin particularly treacherous, the gritters grit but unlike the UK there's no salt in the grit so the roads remain icy.

The Struggle for Existence

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents – punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases – for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.

After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both were put at both ends of things – and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-try upstairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg-fractures, and even dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a toothbrush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.

Quotation: The Cut Glass Bowl by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Penguin 2011