19/11/2024

I always keep my curtains closed. The last time I looked out my window was in first week. After one too many near misses when I forgot to close my curtains and was very nearly seen changing by a tutor, my curtains have stayed – pretty much permanently – closed. I am also, importantly, almost never awake before 10 A.M. Another crucial fact to know about me is that I don’t lock my door at night. I live in a building of only undergrads in college, and locking my door has never seemed necessary (and if you read last week’s column, you’ll know that I am deathly afraid of getting locked in). 

These factors all perfectly aligned to scare the crap out of me at seven in the morning on Tuesday 19th, when my friend flung my door open and yelled “It’s snowing!” If I had even a scrap of strength in me, I probably would have punched him. It took about ten minutes for me to understand what was going on (and about a minute of my friend struggling to open the curtains to prove he wasn’t lying). But seeing my college looking perfect, covered in a clean white layer of untouched snow (we are a sleepy college; most people aren’t out and about until at least 8, so it was only a handful of STEM students with 9 AMs out there) was exhilarating. We did not even wait to get dressed properly; I just shoved some shoes on and we ventured into the freezing cold to experience the snow before it melted.

As I was only half awake, all my memories of that morning have a dream-like quality to them. I kept getting the sense that it wasn’t real. It felt like a stereotypical Christmas episode on a sitcom. As my friend threatened to throw a snowball at the Dean, all I could think was this can’t actually be happening, this feels staged. Alas, the sludge that followed the snow over the next two days, as well as how absolutely freezing my room became, convinced me that the morning had, in fact, been real.

What is it about snow that we love so much? I think potentially it’s that we associate snow with holidays. In primary school, I remember heavy snow days meant that I got to stay at home with my siblings and mum, and we’d make hot chocolate over the stove and build snowmen. We used to make one massive snowman and then an absolutely tiny one next to him – I don’t remember their names now, or even whether they were any good, but I remember how much we used to talk about those two snowmen. 

Snow days are a break from the world. I think they’re on the same level as sick days – the knowledge that you should be in school, the sneaking sense of guilt at knowing you were wasting an entire day – but they didn’t come with the pain of actually being sick (I was, of course, always too scared to fake an illness). Snow days used to not really feel like actual time passing. Often, we couldn’t even really go anywhere, especially when roads were blocked, so we’d just stay inside, maybe venture into the garden or to the park for a snowball fight. They involved warm blankets and Christmas movies and my mum singing Fairytale of New York.

I crave a snow day like that again. I crave the age when being away from school meant it was actually impossible to get homework. With Teams and Canvas and Zoom and all the other websites that they force students to use, I wonder whether my little sisters will ever get to know what a true snow day feels like. I went from shivering in the snow- too cold to really participate in the snowball fight, too cold to do anything much other than observe and take photos- to going back to my room to finish up an essay. 

But for that hour or so that I was outside, I was five years old again, seeing the world as magical, and I think everyone I’ve spoken to feels similarly. There was something adorable about seeing these serious students, many of whom will go on to dominate in their chosen fields, act like kids again. There is no reason for what is essentially just crystallised water to have this effect on us, but Tuesday morning might be the happiest I’ve been all term. As I look ahead to December, I feel that sense of magic creeping more and more into Oxford. I think it’s exactly what we all need.