False advertising

All that fuss ever since, oh, last week at least, promising there would be veritable truckloads of snow descending on London on Thursday. Did it happen? No. Plentylots of little tiny snowflakes; a fair dolloping of rain, too; but as for blanketing on the ground... no. Definitely not.

But this morning, a kindly soul emailed me to say that out in Beckenham (a suburb of London, south-easterly direction) the snow was 2 inches thick, and still pristine since all the kiddywinks were in school. Well! Clearly an expedition was called for.

So having been reliably informed that snow was to be had to the south-east - naturally we headed south-west, to Richmond*. This, while seeming like a reasonable idea, turned out not to be wise. In fact, Richmond appears to have had even less snow than Bloomsbury. Moreover, having never previously been to Richmond Park, and having completely failed to bring the mapbook, we did not actually find much of the park. How hard can it be? It's a big damn park. There are maps at the station. True... but when we got to the nearest corner of the park, all it contained were sportfields. Okay, so go around, right? Er, right. That led us onto the Thames Path, which seems to skirt all the way around the park, without actually going into it at any point.

Not that it mattered. The river was very pretty. The stroll was nice. More little tiny flakes. Hang on, flakes? Flakes don't bounce! Okay, little tiny hailstones. Hm. Interesting. A romantic stroll through the hail, nowhere near the famous Richmond deer. So when we got tired of that (read: when our faces were numb with cold), of course it was easy to head back to the station. Er... well, it would have been, if we'd followed the intuitive route we took on the way out. But no, we made the mistake of following the helpful road signs. Station that way, you say? Even though we came from back thisaway? Right you are. You know best. You are, after all, a road sign. Oh, and look, here's another road sign, still pointing in this direction. We must be doing something right. Surely!

Well, we did get to see a bit of Richmond in our wanderings. Rather more than we'd intended to. A pretty place, if unnecessarily mischievous in its dealings with foolhardy travellers.

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* Hey, it's pretty! There are deer! So I'm told, anyway. And it's about as far out as Beckenham. And, I later heard, there was definitely snow in its close neighbour, Twickenham.