We all know about those southern softies.At the first trace of winter, they persuade themselves climate change means global cooling and fear they've been consigned to Siberia.
It's a source of constant mirth for tough northerners, even those of us who spent our first three months in the wimpish south. I well remember, on my first winter in London, watching colleagues rush to the window at the sight of a few stray flakes of snow. What would they have done had a cow wandered past, since so many Londoners have never seen one?
But I've grown soft, too. And I feel I am getting too old to be sent oop north to Lancashire and, in the call of professional duty, shiver amid the splendidly dark, satanic and (less splendidly) redundant mills of Lancashire.
At 6am yesterday, plodding to the Tube station, all seemed well enough. A little chilly, but no more than we expect in January. I knew I was travelling north-west, but had been negligent in my attention to news bulletins the night before, hearing only that Scotland faced a heavy snowfall.
My snowfall started as the train passed through the northern Midlands. And never really stopped. Now that I am back with Virgin on a much-delayed train home, I hear that it's hit London sufficiently hard to confirm to any surviving former colleagues from the Harrow Observer that Siberia has indeed caught up with us.
Here, then, is a chronological display of the images of my trip to Lancashire ...
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