A short blog about snow...

My twin brother and I have a strange primal thing about snow. Maybe it snowed on the night we were born? It was the 23rd of December.

One of my very earliest memories is one of snow. I was sitting on red kitchen linoleum with my brother with my hands plunged into a big blue basin my mother brought in from the garden. It was full of snow. She brought it in for us to mess around in because she wanted us to experience the stuff but thought it too cold for us outside. She told me earlier today that I was two years old at the time.


This what the Met Eireann rainfall radar reads as I write this blog. My brother told me to check it out because I am pissed off that it is not snowing in Kells. That's a reassuring big blue blob of snow with Kells directly in its path.

I got this text off my bro too. "I am walking along sandymount strand with a slow steady blizzard coming off the sea. It is ghostly."

Gah. I wish I was there too. I can imagine the strand making a curved gleaming crescent moon against the dark sweep of the Irish Sea, and the beacon of Howth lighthouse leaving the dimmest suggestion of itself against the drifts.

If it doesn't snow in Kells tonight my heart will probably break. In recent years it never seemed to. Places within spitting distance always seem to get blanketed while we escape untouched. It'll be our luck to see snow in Athboy, Mullagh and Navan tonight. But not here. Kells will be a sad, circular green wound on the white map. An irradiated abscess. Or maybe we'll get a miserable talcy dusting. And I'll watch with a groaning heart as the local five-year-olds bravely try to scrape it off concrete walls without bending their soft little fingernails into bloodied shreds.

Okay. I'm looking out my window at a stark, starry sky and a baldy back garden. Come on snow. Come to Kells. Come coat us. Make us, for one night, feel a little less boggy and drab. Prettify us. Hans Christian Anderson-ise us. And then disappear. Because if there is one thing worse than no snow, it's slush. Slush; when a dreary county town boils rancidly up from the muddy, iced-up remnants of a picture postcard, and whippet thin kids wearing balaclavas can remove half your ear from fifty yards with the "Kells snowball"; a dirty brown ball of cold shit as hard as granite.

Chilly MP3: David Cain-Autumn and Winter

UPDATE: No snow came. Kells is actually cursed.