Snow in London

I woke up this Sunday morning to two text messages telling me the same thing. Church was cancelled today because it snowed about 6 inches here last night. I'm sure I have a few friends out there who like to ski or snow board that would hope for something similar in Salt Lake City, but there's two major differences here: having snow isn't common in London, and you can find better places to ski at public parks in the Salt Lake area. Since my reason for getting up early was stymied, I got up (a little later) to take a look around.
Because it only typically freezes around here, there are no snow plows to push the snow around. I once saw a truck that looked very similar to a snow plow, but it was missing the plow. It had a tuck bed loaded with grit, salt and sand, and it just sprinkled the stuff everywhere it went. So, the roads that appear to be clear look that way because there has been enough salt thrown down and enough cars driving through to push everything to one side or another. There was a lot of slush at the edge of the main roads I crossed.

Something I thought was cool to see, was that kids here are just like kids in Utah. You may want to click on the picture (to the right) to see it better, but this snowball is about half the size of the kid that's been rolling it. Later in my stroll, I found four boys working together to make their snowball about four feet high. I haven't seen snowmen like this in a long time. I mean, really well done. I'll give an excuse for those in Utah, where I don't see as many snowmen. It wouldn't be near as fun to make if it snowed more than once a year.



There's an interesting little quirk I heard about in England's laws regarding snow removal. I heard about it from two people that don't know each other, so it must be true, right? Their descriptions were really close to being identical. The government here sees snow as an act of god, thus if someone is injured because of the snow no one is to blame. If however, you clear your walk way and someone hurts themselves on your cleared walk way, you are then liable for their claims. The way I heard it summed up was, "Do it properly or don't do it at all."