elegantly dressed, innuit

here is Nanook, trying to claw his way into Seven Sisters station in a beautiful sealskin coat and some really sensible mittens, unlike my fingerless ones

Yesterday was too much of a fuss to write anything. I was frankly knackered from the effort of everyday survival. That's what it's like in the frozen north.

To recap: when we awoke, London was shimmering whitely under a one-inch coating of light snow. It sat on the tree branches, it sat on the cars, it sat on the roofs, and it sat - perhaps most of all, in retrospect - on the points, wherever the Underground goes over the ground.

Dear old London doesn't cope very well with this kind of stuff: even in its article blasting the London Underground bosses for incompetence, the Standard referred to our modest inch of snow as "extreme weather." But really - do the services all think that in other countries the snow juat manages itself? There was not a single speck of sand or salt on Hackney's roads, not one truck, not one municipal worker out to make the borough's surfaces passable. By the time I left the house at 8.15 all the tiny little Hassidic kids were slipping all over the place in a half-inch of very slippy slush. But I made it to the bus.

Seven Sisters station was packed. It was a sea of people, unmoving. Well, they were undulating slightly, as sea plants will. But not going anywhere. The barriers were closed and a voice repeatedly announced that the platforms were too full and thet they were "holding people in the ticketing area." And, one couldn't help noticing, in the corridor areas leading to the street. I stood around for a bit, and then had a sudden forceful image of the gates opening and the crowd surging down to the tube, as one crushing entity. I left. (And 30 seconds behind me a tidal wave of at least fifty people surged out after me: they must have shut the station or made an announcement or something.)

So everybody in the vicinity was heading for the 279 bus. It goes to Manor House station! I jumped on it - by a miracle - and for the next next age and a half, as we creaked to a halt at bus stop after bus stop where dozens of people all waited resiliently, and then couldn't get on the bus because none of my fellow passengers would shift their sorry butts to move down and make room, I wrote, in my head, a post about how people have no idea how to behave on public transport. All the types. I won't list them all here.

This occupied me along the meandering ride through Tottenham, down the broken down escalator in Manor House and for a long, long time on the glacial-speed Piccadilly Line - where a fat man in a navy blue pinstripe suit (with stripes about 2cm apart), a big black jumper and a cheap camel coat stood in the space of three people, holding on to the overhead bars on both sides! so that he, his newspaper and his belly dominated the communal space in the manner of a tenth-rate local gangster, while a pregnant girl stood behind him, squashed. Oh, etc. All the way to Green Park.

I didn't change back on to the Victoria Line. I got out while I could. There's a Prêt à Manger (full name edited in with accents etc for readers abroad) right there, and the park had that sort of snow-muffled sound you get, and everything was white or grey and magical. The few people who were walking through the middle of it looked indistinct, just dark shapes: the environment took over. I walked into the park with my coffee - by now ludicrously late for work - thinking to walk across it. But in the strangeness I lost my bearings! I could have done it, of course - Buck House was just over the way - but the footpaths all looked the same, and there was a sudden sense of those London trudges, and nobody wants one of those. So I went back up and hopped onto a 38 bus, which whisked me in five minutes flat to the Prêt at Victoria. Hurrah!

And it had only taken two hours!