Wet socks, sodden gloves and a gleeful cold trudge: nothing lifts the soul like a snow day

Snow had fallen/Snow on snow, snow on snow…” This, expressed in the words of the poet Christina Rossetti, was the news yesterday morning. Forget Brexit. Forget Trump. Forget everything. As far as London was concerned, it was looking a lot like Christmas and no one could think of anything else.

That’s quite proper. If you cannot greet fresh and unexpected snowfall — snow settling, snow building flake by flake into little drifts on walls, on branches, on the rims of abandoned watering cans — with, just somewhere inside, a little burst of the innocent joy of a child, you have a black and shrivelled soul. I can say this for sure, because I have a black and shrivelled soul.

It’s customary for three under-nines to jump on my head at around 7am on a Sunday. I accept that. It’s my fault. I have kids. I’ve made my bed and I do not get to lie in it. Ordinarily, though, I can groggily palm them off with the iPad and get an extra half-hour of shut-eye while they surf the net for porn. That’s the most precious half hour of the week.

But yesterday one of the little so-and-sos had the awful inspiration to stick his head up under the blind and take a quick peek at East Finchley before starting the traditional fight with his brother about who gets to climb in next to Mum. The noise he made — imagine the simple syllable “snow” wired through Led Zeppelin’s speaker-stack via a wah-wah pedal operated by the criminally insane — set off car alarms four doors down. And then they all got in on the act, obviously.

All sibling niggling, all moaning and groaning, all whining about what was for supper and whether they could watch Strictly later, was set aside. Their eyes shone. They jumped up and down and yelped and scampered, then returned to the window to press their little noses against the chilly pane as if they couldn’t believe anything so magical had happened ever. And their father was, naturally, downcast at their appalling happiness.

His mind filled glumly with the thought of wet socks, sodden gloves, filthy grey slush in the streets, the inevitable tweets from global warming sceptics, the mandatory good humour when your infant gets a snowball down your neck, and the way in which London infallibly grinds to a complete and utter fricking halt the instant anything resembling a snowflake falls out of the sky.

In Russia’s icy Novosibirsk, so I hear, trains run and cars negotiate the roads all year round. But by mid-morning the friends we were expecting for lunch were in touch to say the icy slopes of Crouch End were impassable, and it seemed we’d be eating a 24-sausage toad-in-the-hole by ourselves.

But you know what? Cousins showed up, muffled in scarves, an over-the-fence snowball fight with the neighbours turned into a visit, and the sausages got eaten after all. After lunch we trudged out under a grey smudge of sky into Coldfall Wood, which was fretted with snow more than 100 years before Rossetti wrote that poem, and found it still fretted with snow. And by the time darkness fell I found I hadn’t missed my lie-in, not much, after all.

Do stop taking Saoirse so seriously

Irish actor Saoirse Ronan has taken a lot of flak for a sketch about Aer Lingus in which she appeared on Saturday Night Live. The sketch contained lots of blarney, running jokes about pet dogs, references to fiddles and Oscar Wilde and the suggestion that Aer Lingus in-flight food consists entirely of potatoes. These, it was said, are offensive stereotypes; and besides, the skit wasn’t funny. True enough. And where would we all be without offensive stereotypes?

There is at least as long a tradition of Irish people mocking themselves as there is of Jewish people mocking themselves. And there’s a comparably long tradition of Saturday Night Live sketches not being very funny. Honour is satisfied all round.

Is Trump really a kindred spirit?

As so often, it’s the personal details about historic figures that speak to the imagination. Tony Benn, in his Diaries, recorded accidentally eating a mothball thinking it was a Polo mint (“I spat it out and drank a glass of milk, which I remembered was the best thing”) and that gave the reader a sense of him that was far more lasting than any of his policy positions over the years.

It’s the same with Trump. Yes, he’s a beast but his daily routine is what grips. Diet Cokes drunk: 12. Hours of TV watched: 4-8. Preferred McDonald’s order: two Big Macs, two Filets-O-Fish (I trust I pluralise this correctly) and a chocolate milkshake. Apparently he struggles to start work before 9:30am. If you hadn’t known this was the routine of the leader of the free world, you’d have had him pegged for a depressed freelance writer.

* I’m pleased to read that Gloucestershire-based sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley has won the commission to produce a life-sized statue of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Some childish attention has been paid to his interest in “the naked figure” — but how many serious sculptors do not have such an interest? And we can surely pity those Cotswold neighbours whose unprintable rhyming nickname for the great man ends “-Boredly”. High art makes no apology to low minds.