For some reason, the entire damn country (or at least London, which amounts to more or less the same thing as, as any Londoner will tell you, not only rational society but THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT ceases to exist outside the M25, the rest of England being TOTALLY AND ENTIRELY MYTHOLOGICAL) appears to have been paralyzed by snow.

Mindboggling when you consider we only had a couple of inches. Yet the store was dead, barely anyone ventured outside - apparently Mass Transit Chaos was not only predicted but emerged. Peope were even being advised, I shit ye not, to stay home from work and not go out unless they had to. I would have thought 'going to work' counted as an obligation, myself, and here's me only doing voluntary shifts in a charity shop, but... yeah, anyway, a couple of inches snow and everyone's acting like the sky is falling.

Seriously, fuck the what? It's a cold snap, not Hell Unleashed. How do the mythical They think people cope in Sapporo? (Apaprt from collecting all the snow and Making It Into Big Illuminated Things.) Society doesn't come shuddering to a halt the minute winter arrives and stay that way until the thaw.

The back garden was Prettiness this morning, though.

In fact, the walk in was Prettiness until I got to Leigham Court Road where all the traffic and people had turned a lot of the snow to horrible icky gray-brown slush, and thereby hangs a tale. Maybe not a terribly interesting tale, but a tale nonetheless.

In an attempt to be Not Goddam Predictable about the snow, here is the saga of my boots.

I don't have a lot of good boots I can wear into work. I have one pair with heels, which look nice but firstly aren't good to wear all day as they're murder on the feet and second they're brown and thus did not go with the blue and black clothes I was wearing today. So I decided to wear another pair of boots I have which are black, and have (in this mild winter we've had) proved more than adequate in the past when it comes to keeping my feet dry.

We don't get snow a lot here, so I had no opportunity before now to check if they'd stand up to what is, effrectively, freezing cold delayed-action rain that hangs about the place in huge piles.

This, as it turns out, was a mistake. A big one. By the time I got to the aforementioned Leigham Court Road with all the buses and cars and slush, my feet were feeling a little bit cold and a little bit damp. I could live with this, however. Or I could have done had I not discovered that my boots, warm though they were in dry weather, had something of a fondness for slush. In fact, they loved slush. They sucked it up with alactrity and clamored for more. Unfortunately for me, more there was, in abundance, and more they were grateful to recieve.

By the time I reached Streatham, my feet were soaked. I could have replicated the effect by standing ankle-deep in a bucket of icy water for a few minutes then catching the bus.

So, I really had no choice but to abandon my plans to go straight to work in favor of going to the shoe shop and getting a new pair of black ankle boots which were actually waterproof. I had no other shoes to wear and there was no way I could have stood around with those things on waiting for them to dry off. Trench foot has no place in nice charity bookstores, and I didn't particularly want to have to run around after myself with a cloth mopping up every time I tried to walk, well, anywhere.

Oh well. I wanted a pair of black ankle boots I could wear to work anyway.

*uses icon with Ken in snow, just because.*