Last year, the only snow I remember happened on three or four separate days over the course of the winter. Mostly it wasn’t real snow, just sleet that had flown horizontally across the gardens, landed as less than 1cm on the ground, and was gone within a day or two. Being a good Canadian I had bought an ice scraper by the first of November, but never once used it.
This week has seen the most snow that Orkney has had in a few years. People are (mostly) driving slower, the gritter (sander) has been around to sand the roads, and for some reason, the biggest impact I’ve seen is that Orcadians seem to lose all sense of parking when the snow sticks – I didn’t have my camera with me but two separate parking lots looked like people (who have been using these lots for years ) just pulled in, and decided to step out of their cars and leave them higgledy-piggledy strewn about the lot.
It took about 15 minutes to scrape the car yesterday afternoon. Real sense of déjà vu. But at least we’re not experiencing the outages and layers of snow that Shetland is. I drive south tomorrow – here’s hoping the roads are clear.