SNOW IN BUDAPEST

At last! It'd been one of those post-global-warming non-event winters here until yesterday. I'd given up reading the online forecast and my thoughts had drifted elsewhere when I opened my curtains and there it was - filling the air. It fell all day without stopping once. There's nothing I can write about snow that hasn't already been written, and yet it seems like a new experience every time, I suppose because the cityscape is so transformed.

The first glimpse of it was in the Buda hills on Sunday. It started falling as we were climbing up to the wooden tower on top of one of the hills. It looked golden with the late afternoon sun illuminating it. The wood became like a scene from Lothlorien. We all had to grab big sticks so that we could edge down without falling, though the Hungarians were able to breeze past in trainers. They had their snow feet while we stumbled and joked about being trapped up there as night fell.

Yesterday it came in earnest, piling up on the branches and car bonnets. The best scene was the Parliament buliding - imagine the Palace of Westminster rebuilt on an impossibly large scale to dwarf all the surroundings, half-glimpsed through netted veils of snow, the chandeliers of imagined long halls - this building surely cannot have mere rooms - visible through its windows. All of this is seen from a bright yellow tram which travels along one bank of the Danube, making a neat arc round Parliament. As it drops us off, people are huddled well into their coats; this is the coldest it has been. Really chilling around your legs and on your face, as cold as I have ever felt. I try to picture the physics of all those almost motionless unheated particles and how their influence is draining off the warmth from my skin.