Tuesday 9th February - morning - Snow!

 After Sunday's rather disappointing effort, snow started happening again on Monday morning and has continued since, falling in small, fine dusty flake which slowly accumulate. Yesterday  there was a decent dusting of snow on the grass; today the tips of the grass are just poking through the snow like Mrs Tiggywinkle's prickles showing through her cap;

A friend told me that her children had been sledging on the local hill on Sunday. They returned home completely coated in mud. I don't think there had been anything like enough snow, but it might be better this afternoon. 

James-the-garden-expert came round on Monday morning to finish the work he started last Monday (and also retrieve his hat which he had left behind). He has covered all the long flower border, and most of my larger patio pots with a layer of rich topsoil. It was steaming and smelling faintly of farm manure as he transferred it from barrow to flowerbed! But the weather is so cold that the snow was soon able to form a new layer on top. The smell seemed to disappear quickly as well - thank heavens!

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A pleasant surprise yesterday was that when I opened the Kindle app on my tablet the 'print' was black on white. Now, why should that be a surprise? Because for the last few days it has appeared as pale blue, almost invisible against the white background. Very weird. It was possible to reset it by changing the colour of the 'paper' to cream or sepia or whatever, whereupon the letters would turn black, and when one reset it to 'white' paper the letters stayed black. 

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Another pleasant surprise is that we actually have a delivery date for the printer we ordered on Boxing Day when our old printer printed its last ever sheet of paper. Or part sheet, as it happened. It has been a bit of a saga; we think it is because we took the option of an offer on extra ink, which probably doubled the number of customs declarations and other paperworky stuff post-Brexit. A bit like the problems that a cheese supplier is having with exporting mixed selection boxes of cheese to the EU, needing a complete and separate set of paperwork for each of the cheeses in every box.

Now we are waiting to see if we will have to pay tax or admin charges before we can have the delivery... and although the delivery date is tomorrow, or was that today? we are not placing any great expectations on seeing it so soon. Especially as it has been sitting over in the East of England, where most of the snow has fallen.

Meanwhile I continue to teach piano using my telephone to read the music - reading the music two bars at a time and scrolling from side to side and up and down. Yesterday I used the tablet to read some music, sent to me by a pupil who is using a book that I don't have. I propped the tablet on the music rest and hoped it would not slip and chop my fingers off on its way to the floor. There comes a point when tech cannot conveniently replace paper and pencil...