It snowed! Drawing back the bedroom curtains I saw, with delight, that it was snowing. Just tiny flakes that seemed like mini parachutes swirling one way and another in the wind before disappearing upon touchdown. It continued to snow when we were in the car on our way to the shops at Newton Abbot but the snow wasn’t heavy enough to settle and nor was it quite cold enough, although we felt freezing.

The temperature dropped from four to two degrees centigrade and when we came out of Lidl’s (Britains’s favourite store according to a newspaper article yesterday) the snow had turned to light sleet – not enough to make you wet but icy cold and damp.

Getting back into the car at Tesco’s car park the temperature seemed to have dropped yet further and the sleet had given way to hail. The hailstones were the size of miniature sherbet pips, not exactly round and hardly worthy of being called hailstones; in fact, so light and small were the specks of ice that, like the snowflakes earlier, they seemed to dance in the wind.

By the time we returned home it was too cold for hail. The bitter wind hit us as Chris and I struggled along the pavement with our many bags of shopping (even heavier than usual because my nephew Michael and his friend are over from Australia and going to stay with us for a few days). Just before reaching our gate I stopped, put down my six carrier bags, and took my mobile phone out of my handbag. A couple walking towards me looked at me quizzically as I was obviously taking photographs of the sidewalk.

“I couldn’t resist,” I said.

They looked down at the pavement and laughed. Surprisingly, in spite of the wind a little leaf had held fast to protect the modesty of the naked figure on the tarmac.

Not a Goliath