I'm sitting in front of my computer, looking out of the window at the flurry of furry white clusters and wisps sweeping across the sky (Nabokov has it best: "slow scintillant downcome"), while Ella and Louis croon "Stars Fell On Alabama". And for a moment, I picture a cosmic conflagration, an astral armageddon, celestial bodies ablaze and plummeting to earth, a flaming landscape, people being pummelled by asteroids, pyroclasts and other projectiles...

(Happiness is this, she thought)

I'm having the same stuff for lunch. The baguette has self-petrified. B thinks I may have mono (what is that, anyway?), but I can't be bothered to trudge to UHS in this divine weather.

The record stops. I put on A's Rhapsody in Blue, which makes a fitting soundtrack to snowfall. I must be imagining this, but the tempo of the snow flurries seems to fluctuate, stately and temperate during the sotto voce piano cadenzas, feral and frenetic during the full-orchestra reprises. Branches periodically collapse under the weight of deposited snow, creating a powder bloom in the air, and then this too flutters down to the ground in a shower.

Ah, I know, Debussy would make the perfect soundscape for snow. Now, what can I eat to fit in with the theme? Oeufs à la neige?

One day in JC2 assembly, after the death of two canoeists (sailors? can't remember) was announced and a minute of silence was requested, the most rapid pencil sketch of rain (Nabokov again) fell onto the bowed heads. The heavens wept. A pathetic fallacy in real life.