X-mas In February

When snow falls on London town it brings about an extra bank holiday. When it happens on a Monday, the day on which regular bank holidays usually fall, there is one more reason to stay at home (be it a hostel, a rented room in flat share or a semi-detached house). A few million people cannot do better for there is no public transport. The day has become another Christmas Day, the only day officially without any buses or tube service. To give the justice its due, today there remain a few lines not wholly but partly suspended, operating with severe delays. However, they will not spoil the magic effect snow is having on life in a temporarily disabled city.

It happens once or twice a year a genuine winter day as we know it from the Continent arrives in the suburbs. We have known the freeze and the icy wind, now we are recompensed by a freely distributed white coat. "Let the streets, roofs and sills wear it," cry Londoners who learn to slide in its fur quickly. "We are celebrating in summer shoes, cars in summer tyres, cats with summer hair and trees in summer bark." It is eternal summer in this eternal city.

It only gets disrupted every time and again by "adverse weather conditions". In other words, we have every kind of weather, every season of the year in all their variations at least once a year. And we know how to celebrate it. When a foot of snow lands in our world, we can close the airports, withdraw buses, suspend the tube and, watching the joyous niblets flitter in their games of May through ice-licked glass, we keep up our calm composure of proud Londoners. Because we know the weather will not (keep up). Tomorrow everything will become early spring and many of us will have to trudge through the slush of their average working lives. After all, there is no X-mas in February, as Lou Reed has put it in one of his New York songs.