Filomena's snow

Our son in Scotland once introduced us to a remarkable woman called Filomena, who had a campsite near Loch Tay, where we once enjoyed a stay. Obviously, camping in Scotland’s a bit of a special taste, since it’s either bitterly cold or it’s reasonably warm and crawling with midges. I’m sure there are days between the seasons, in spring or autumn, when it’s lovely though the midges haven’t cottoned on yet, but I’ve never had the good fortune to pick those days for a camping trip.

At Filomena’s, it was cold. She made up for it, though, with warmth of heart and wildness of character, a kind of hangover from the hippies of the sixties. 

Valencia snow scene: young almond trees coping with the cold

I thought of her again this week in Spain, when storm Filomena hit the peninsula. As wild as the child of the sixties, and even colder than a tent in the Highlands, it brought Spain the biggest snowfall it’s seen in a century, and the lowest temperature ever recorded in the country – 35.8 degrees Celsius below zero some 400 km north of Madrid. 

At one time we lived in Alsace, in Eastern France, where heavy snow is a routine happening in winter. In such places, procedures and equipment are in place to deal with snowstorms when they happen. I remember hearing the snow ploughs heading out at 3:00 am in Alsace, with the result that the main roads at least were clear by the time the morning rush started.

Now, places like Spain, or indeed England where we lived before coming here, don’t have either the resources or the processes in place to react that fast or that efficiently. Snow just snarls the country up. I remember, at every snowfall in England, there’d be tales of drivers stuck in their cars overnight on the motorways. There’d be lots of pride about the spirit of the Blitz, with people helping each other out and keeping their morale up in atrocious conditions. That amused me, since all I could think was, “why don’t you just buy some snowploughs and train some guys to use them, for overtime payments, when these things happen? Britain is the sixth biggest economy in the world, after all.”

The inclement weather is, apparently, all part of global warming. I know the deniers will say “warming? You call this warming?” But I love the fact that warming can lead to great drops in temperature too. If nothing else, it shows the nature of an average – the average can go up even if an individual value goes catastrophically down. 

It also illustrates another favourite theme of mine, the paradoxical nature of things. I loved the idea (though I loathed the phenomenon whenever I got caught up in it) that the orbital motorway around London, the M25, built to reduce traffic congestion, just added to it. The new motorway won itself the enviable title of “longest car park in the world”.

Similarly, I’m just tickled pink by the idea that Donald Trump is so shameful because he’s entirely shameless.

So extreme cold due to global warming? Strikes me as wholly in line with the nature of things.

It’s certainly true that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Down here in the coastal plain near Valencia, we just got rain. Lots of it. The poor dogs probably didn’t enjoy the route marches I took them on through the woods quite as much as I claimed they did when Danielle called me mad for forcing them to follow me. But we saw no snow. 

Javi, with his trademark smile: organiser of great outings

So today we went up into the hills to find it ourselves. We went with our excellent friend Javi (pronounced roughly Habi) who leads our Nordic Walking group. This time we took the Nordic Walking sticks, as ever, but added snow shoes (or rackets as they’re called here, convincing me that snow walking’s a racket).

The thing about Javi is that he must be working with several hundred people in various types of sport. Whenever we go on walks with him, we find ourselves in a group of around 20 people, at least 18 of whom we’ve never met before. Since they’re almost without exception generous, amusing and fun to know, it makes taking part in the outings he organises as pleasurable for the social interactions as they’re healthy for the exercise.

He wins every point, the Latin poet Horace declared, who combines the agreeable with the useful. Javi did just fine on that measure. On a wonderful day of snow in a part of the world which doesn’t see that much of the stuff.

The group. 
That's me on the left. Lying down because I'm so laid back?
Oh, no. I fell over trying to put my mask on.
The woman crouching next to me? I brought her down with me