Biggles almost in an adventure with snow

I remember the first time my two cats first encountered snow. They rushed out the back door as usual of a morning and both stopped in mid-air at the sight of the blanket of snow that had covered their patch and came back inside to sit annoyingly on the back door mat so I could not shut the back door until they had made up their tiny feline minds. Whilst I became colder and colder, they sat there for a while cogitating on whether their needs were really that important to warrant having to go forth into such strangeness, but eventually their bladder/bowels/curiosity got the better of them and off they went, one by one down the garden to do what they individually had to do.

Now, as those of you who have some yourself will have realised, cats do tend to exaggerate. To watch them tackle the snow was highly entertaining. They didn’t just walk to their intended destination, but did a kind of half bunny hop/deer leap through the carpet of white strangeness. We had received a fair downfall during the evening, so the back garden had a blanket of an inch or so and they could have walked fairly easily through it, but – no – in true drama queen fashion they had to make it plain that they were not at all amused at getting their legs covered in cold snow perfectly clear.

When I woke up this morning to witness what looked like quite a thick snowfall occurring I thought “Great” to myself. “Now we can see how the intrepid Major James will tackle this new experience”. Sadly, though, when I got downstairs I discovered that there had not been a serious snowfall at all and the paths and grass were not covered in an unspoilt layer, just begging for a few photographs to be taken. And there would be no adults in wellie-clad feet childishly tramping through it either. Disappointingly, it was more like a sprinkling of icing sugar on an uneven topped Victoria spongecake.

Therefore, Biggles just did his usual pottering around, completely unimpressed, and probably not even noticing the odd white stuff on a few patches of grass and earth. What was noticeable though was that, although we refer to him as being a black and white dog, against the starkness of the small amount of snow, his white patches actually looked more like a dirty off-white. So, in future – for propriety’s sake at any rate - I shall refer to him as a black and cream dog I think.

But, that does bring me on to a rather tantalising thought. As you may well have seen from previous posts on here and on the main CFZ site, there have been black cat sightings in this area for quite a while. If it were to snow more so that the fields were buried under a healthy layer of Christmas-card prettiness, just think how a black cat would stand out against it?