By 
It’s been a bad aul week weather-wise; the kind that would make even the most ruddy-faced turf-rickler in Rouskey purse his lips, inhale sharply and whisper those words reserved for only the gravest of meteorological conditions: “Tara altogether.”
Conversely – depending on your age, occupation, bone health, and the miserliness or extravagance of whoever controls the thermostat in your house – you might consider the week we’ve just had nothing short of an absolute belter.
Because how you experience snow is, like most things, relative to your circumstances.
Personally, my attitude to the white bringer of chaos – a light skift of which is capable of bringing our entire society to a glorious halt – hasn’t changed much over the years.
When I was wee, I loved it: Watching the first flakes fall, waking up to that virginal sheet of white outside the window, pure and unsullied.
Then going out and sullying the absolute life out of it; snowmen, sledging, iceballs that may or may not have had stones inside and that I may or may not have aimed at your face.
“Get yer da! You can’t prove it wasn’t snow that knocked that tooth out. Maybe I’ve just a rocket launcher of a right arm.”
And you can call me infantile. You can call me puerile. You can even call me a big freaky man-child of the least charming and endearing sort – I don’t care. Because just as I loved the snow at eight, I still love it at 28.
Which is probably why my heart howled like an overworked husky earlier this week when I heard that, after school being snowed off on what should have been the first day back after the holidays, local post-primary principals had gotten together – cabal-style – and decided, instead of giving pupils the Tuesday off as well, to move all classes online.
I mean, what sort of sickos do they put in charge of our schools?
As anyone who’s ever slipped back into their school uniform after two weeks of gluttony and slothfulness will know, there is no pain like that engendered by the juxtaposition of Christmas and the classroom.
If you could bottle it and administer it for interrogation purposes, it would make waterboarding look like a tickling match.
When I was a cub, school seemed never to be called off because of snow – with the exception of the year of The Big Snow, of course.
I remember one incident in first year when, hearing my name shouted from across the yard, I innocently looked up to see who was calling me, only to see a blurry white missile racing towards my face. It was already at terminal velocity.
By the time I clocked it, it clocked me, right between the eyes. It felt, looked and behaved like glass; exploding into sharp, crystalline shards.
Before the pain kicked in and I heard everyone laughing – both of which I was perversely grateful for, as they were a welcome indication that I still had a head – I briefly thought I might be the only person in the world who fully understood what JFK felt in his final nanoseconds.
A few years later, stood on the same yard, the lower one at the CBS, I remember throwing a snowball and hitting a future principal, at that stage just a scary teacher – at least I considered him scary, especially after what I did – somewhere on the posterior of his body.
He turned around, slowly, saw me standing there looking whiter than the snow, and stared at me.
Paralysed by fear, I waited for him to raise his hand and beckon me to my doom with a single curl of his finger.
But he didn’t. We just stared at each other, then he looked away.
I’ve never been sure why.
Maybe he saw the terror in my face that I’d been caught white-handed, and that was victory enough.
Or maybe – just maybe – he was saying, “That’s us even now.”
Maybe it were him who nearly took my head off a few years earlier.
