Sally Coulthard - The Little Book of Snow

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Is it true that no two snowflakes are ever alike? How many Christmases have actually been white? Do the Inuit have dozens of words for snow? Can it ever be too cold to snow?

Our memories and imagination are buried in snow. Its the weather of play, joyful abandon and mischievous games of snowball fights, skiing holidays and rattling down a hillside at full speed. Its the weather of childhood the world transformed into a temporary playground. Even as adults, the urge to throw a snowball is too hard to resist, those impish, childish instincts overtaking our adult workaday selves.

Packed with fascinating insights, outdoor fun, cultural lore and traditional wisdom, The Little Book of Snow delves into the history, science, literary and cultural heritage that surrounds snow, frost and ice the perfect book for anyone who loves that feeling when you open the curtains in the morning and find the world has turned to white

And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

For James

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Snow-flakes ,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My parents have a photograph of me as a child. Im about eight years old in it and standing next to me is my best friend. Were in the doorway of our old house and, behind our heavy fringes and freckles, were grinning from ear to ear. I can remember that picture being taken; wed just found out that school had been cancelled, torn off our itchy uniforms and hurriedly dressed in the warmest clothes we could find. Im wearing mismatched gloves, a tatty bobble hat and dungarees. My friend has grabbed a thin coat and her sisters wellies shes holding two empty feed bags from her dads farm. We look cold and impossibly cheerful. Its snowed heavily overnight. And were going plastic bag sledging.

Waking up to a world covered in snow still has that effect, more than thirty years later. The view has changed from suburb to open fields but the feelings are still the same. That unexpected white blanket has an extraordinary power the quality of light, the peaceful muffling, the way snow can cloak familiar objects into new shapes and sculptures. Its transformative.

For us, as kids, snow was synonymous with fun. Snow meant speed, exhilaration and toppling laughter. Snow gave us the freedom to fight, slide, crash and make a mess, without the fear of a sound telling off. Snow put a spanner in the works, stopped the numbing timetable of lessons and stole an extra day of free time from the working week. It didnt matter if you had an expensive wooden sledge or a black bin liner, snow was democratic everyone was entitled to its pleasures.

As an adult, snow can be a mixed blessing. It still has the power to stop us in our tracks with its mesmerising beauty, but it can also mean traffic delays and the anxiety of a broken routine. Snow, when it really means business, can and has brought the country to a standstill, reminding us not to get too complacent. I like that though we need a poke in the ribs once in a while, just to put us in our place.

The farm where I live with my young family nestles in the bottom of a valley. Access to the house is down a narrow, steep track, about a third of a mile (half a kilometre) long. When the snow comes, it turns the road into a giant frozen slide, lethal for the farm machinery and vehicles that need to come and go. Two particularly bad consecutive winters, about ten years ago, left us marooned for weeks the snow was so deep we had to trudge to the top of the hill and flag down passing farmers to take us into town. We soon learned our lesson, scraping together enough money to buy a second-hand 4x4 that could cope with whatever the snow threw at us.

So, for my husband, winter can mean back-breaking dawns spent shovelling, scraping or blowing drifts to clear our only route out to civilisation. And yet, hes not averse to the lighter side of snow. A brilliant skier, for him snow represents a chance to break away from being responsible and reclaim the giddy pleasure of hurtling down a mountainside; for him, and many other people, skiing and other winter sports, are about total immersion few pastimes allow such a cocktail of personal freedom, self-expression, adrenaline and cracking views.

We had another snowy winter this year. While we were killing time, watching the flakes tumble past the window, my youngest daughter whos five asked a flurry of questions, including Where does snow came from? and Why is snow white? I realised I didnt know. And so began the process of writing this book its a miscellany really, an assortment of things about snow, ice and winter weather that you might not already know. I wanted to find out answers to questions like Why is snow so squeaky ?, Whats the best snow for snowballs? and Wheres the coldest place you could choose to live?, and at the same time, try to get to grips with a little of the science of snow. Does anything grow in the Arctic, for example, or how do animals cope with freezing temperatures? And what about humans? How have we survived the ravages of cold weather for the hundreds of thousands of years weve inhabited our planet?

Whats clear, from researching and writing this book, is that our climate is changing. The effects of this are particularly acute at the Polar Regions, but the ripples are being felt across the globe. Some of the changes can feel counterintuitive how can global warming create more intense snow storms across the US and, at the same time, cause spring to arrive earlier than it used to? The answers are complex, and only touched on here, but its important to raise the questions in the first place. We have many of the practical solutions at hand, but it takes political will and social pressure to address these issues effectively.

Because the reality is that we need snow; primarily because it is a vital cog in the environmental wheel and without it we are, for want of a better word, knackered, but also because it represents such a core feature of who we are, our shared culture and heritage. It might seem fatuous to fret about what Christmas would look like without snow, when we should be worrying about rising sea levels, but the two things go hand in hand. If we let ourselves imagine a world without snow, only then do we really start to understand what we might lose.

But lets not start on a glum note. This book is ultimately a celebration of snow the science, the history, the relationship between us and the weather, and a brief exploration of how snow is intertwined with so many of our cultural references and celebrations. Oh, and its also an insurance policy so that I have the answers ready the next time my snow-obsessed daughter asks a tricky question