The green shoots of recovery.

The last three mornings I have woken up, having dreamt that the snow has finally melted, only to have my hopes dashed when I raised the blinds. (Did you know that 'dreamt' is the only word in the English language - apart from 'daydreamt' maybe - that ends in 'amt'?)

Having said that, a steady drip... drip... drip... does mean that it is starting to melt. Too early to get our hopes up just yet, there are still forecasts for more snow to come. Let's hope that we don't get close to breaking the record set in the winter of 1962/1963 - it snowed every day between Boxing Day 1962 and 6th March 1963 (somewhere in the UK)... 71 consecutive days! (so far, I think we are up to about 29 days).

I used to host weekly quizzes in the pubs I used to run, and I still have a penchant for trivia. So here is some random 'snow' trivia I have picked up:

1. Don't eat yellow snow. This advice was officially given to South Koreans in 2005 when dust from Chinese deserts, containing heavy minerals and pollutants, turned the snow yellow.
2. Snow can also be green, orange or red as a result of algae.
3. Everyone knows that snowflakes have 6 sides, but, apparently, they can have 3 or 12 sides too, and a 1966 snowflake classification included 80 different types of snow. I can feel your fascination from here.
4. The idea that the Inuit have over 100 different words for snow is a myth - they have 2 ("qani" means falling snow and "api" means snow lying on the ground). But, the Inuit language is agglutinative (meaning they join different words together to form one long word), so, in theory, there could be thousands of different Inuit words for snow.
5. Driving too close to the vehicle in front (especially during snowy/icy conditions) WILL increase your chances of crashing. Oops, I have already covered this one.
I have more snow trivia, but I don't want you getting too excited.

Talking of getting excited, the Met Office website predicts temperatures of 5C in Forres tomorrow, and I may even find Ullapool swelters at 9C over the weekend. So, as Business minister Baroness Vadera (in)famously said, it may be that we can finally 'see a few green shoots' of recovery.

Unfortunately, as I have just seen on my way to Katie's lesson in Hopeman, the disappearing snow brings further problems: Potholes and the return of idiotic overtaking. Actually, what am I saying? The idiotic overtaking never went away, it was just done at a (slightly) slower speed.