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Snow flutter

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The evenings are getting lighter and the sun brighter. Winter has gone and spring is in the air. Well, it was for a while. Then it snowed last Sunday. One minute we were enjoying the blue sky; the next we were watching council trucks grit the roads.

We should have known. The writing was on the wall on the Saturday, when London premiership football club Fulham's game with Sunderland was abandoned in the first half. You have to feel sorry for the Fulham fans: a 480km trip north for 21 minutes of football, then 480km back. As if to taunt them a second time, the snow followed them home.

Fifty kilometres south of London, in Tunbridge Wells, Kent - the mock-Tudor semi-detached heart of the London stockbroker belt - 5cm of snow fell. This small town has become the spiritual home of those people who love to flood newspaper letters columns with gripes about anything from the price of fuel to the latest supermarket monopoly.

But, somewhat surprisingly, there were few complaints about the snow. The town and its lush hinterland may have been experiencing unseasonal weather, but it was more like a winter wonderland from a C.S. Lewis novel - a natural and cheap playground for children on holiday. 'Who needs Chamonix?' crowed one newspaper, as thousands flew to the Alps for Easter.

Amid the sprouting hop fields and market gardens, wellington boots were being donned, snowmen built and sledges dusted off. Locals could finally put their petrol-guzzling 4x4s to better use than shopping or taking the children to the nursery. Now they had to negotiate slick roads littered with snow-toppled trees.

A Polish friend from nearby Sevenoaks texted me on my mobile phone to say she was going out for a snowball fight. I thought she was back home in Gdansk.

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