… when the alarm woke me up. The skylights in the roof had about 3cms of snow all over them.

And so after breakfast I went for a wander around and a bit of a photography session. You can see how much snow fell during the night, and it was still chucking it down as I was a-wandering.

After my little perambulation I rang up Liz and spoke to her about the proposed group meal. We had a good chat for half an hour or so. They had had the snowplough down their lane at 10:00 and by 11:00 it had all snowed over again.

I was having charging issues in this weather so I shinned out of the side window with the yard brush up onto the roof and brushed the snow off the solar panels where I could reach. That generated something and I had to do it a couple of times during the day. I’m going to have to work out a remote way of doing that in due course. Heated trace wire seems to be one possibility.

I went to brush the snow off the panels that are on the roof of the Luton Transit and which power the barn but I couldn’t find the ladder – half of the old wooden green one. it was there last winter and I do remember lying it down but it seems to have disappeared. I wonder if I lent it to someone. I had to improvise a ladder to get up there and brush things down.

I started to fit the turn-round step in the Stairway to Heaven but I’ve hit upon a major design fault. Not that this is any surprise – I was wondering how it was that I have managed to avoid that fate so far. I haven’t allowed for the height of the extra beam that I fitted. It’s not a major issue and I can work round it by having several angled turn-round steps in the corner that will drop me nicely underneath it. It just means that I could have better-managed my staircase. Ahh well.

And at 14:00 precisely that strange golden thing appeared again – and loitered around for about 10 minutes before it started snowing again.

This afternoon Bill rang me up and invited me to his house for Boxing Day. He’ll be having some friends round. That was nice of him. He was telling me about the over-60s dinner that his village organised and to which he was invited. He said that never mind the hairdos, most of the women had had a good shave. It wasn’t the “blue-rinse brigade” that I used to deal with when I worked at Shearings but the “blue chin brigade”. I blame it on all of the hormones that they pump into the cattle round here.

Claude came round for a chat too and he was here a while. We heard the snow-plough arrive and dashed out just in time to see it disappearing back up the lane. It had managed to get within 50 yards of me before it pliddled off, leaving me still snowed-in. But then again it’s much closer than he got last year when I was left snowed-in for four days.

But all of that explains why I haven’t done too much today. I cut another vertical and cut a couple of lets into the beams to take it. And much to my surprise it fitted absolutely perfectly and went into tension without even being screwed in. Now I call that an achievement! If it goes light tomorrow I’ll screw it in. It will be nice to see what I am doing.

Meanwhile, it’s now 28 days since we had a day without any kind of precipitation at all. Today was enough snow for the equivalent of 5cms of rain. And apart from that one morning last week it’s now been 22 days since I’ve had a decent amount of solar energy and 6 days since we had any temperature above freezing point. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

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