The Man with No Time

This weekend was the first BULSCA competition of the new year: the Warwick Refreshers Competition. I always enjoy travelling back to my undergraduate haunt, and to be honest would have gone down even if we hadn’t had a team.  This wasn’t entirely a foregone conclusion given that the competition was taking place on the weekend directly preceding the start of the semester at St Andrews, but we did pull a team together (we even had an extra helper with us), so away we went. Or at least three of us did; the other two were travelling straight to Coventry from home. Having isolation in this lecture theatre brought back memories for me. (Credit: Adam James Martin)

Today has been a good day. Not only did we get another heavy snowfall, but it lasted all morning and was that wonderful snow that makes great snowballs. You know, the kind that's all large flakes, sticks together nicely, and looks really pretty when it settles. I woke up late thanks to my over-optimistic observing sleep-pattern (I don't know why I was still hopeful that I'd get any observing done this week, and it was snowing heavily. More excitingly, it was settling! It didn't stop snowing until about 1 o'clock, at which point everything had a lovely layer of snow all over it. This was the view from my bedroom window when I woke up about at about 10:00. It only got better from there. (Credit: David Brown) So after our usual Friday lunchtime pub trip we stopped in the gardens above the Physics department to make a snowman, and have a snowball fight. It was glorious. Best day I've had at work in a long time. Oh, and I handed in my first draft thesis ...

Whilst most of the UK seems to be in the grip of something approximating a very small blizzard (which naturally is causing panic everywhere), St Andrews seemed to escape the snowy menace. For the last few days it's been mostly wet, punctuated by periods of glorious sunshine. I confess that I was disappointed; I rather like the snow, and enjoy riding through it on my bike. Not to mention the snowball opportunities. It's also very pretty. However, over lunchtime today we actually had a snowfall. More like a snowstorm actually - it was pretty heavy for a while! Sadly though it didn't settle really, and what little that did vanished within an hour after the snow stopped. It was just too wet. Ah well, it makes me hopeful at least that we'll get more in the next few days. Fingers crossed.