In which the title of this blog is still an accurate description of my location...

In other words my flight was cancelled. Not anything to do with the weather here of course, just that the people in Gatwick have given up caring and stopped shovelling snow or something. From what I can gather from t'facebook, the UK appears to either have been taken by surprise by extra snow or too darn lazy to do anything about it, which has somewhat inconvenienced people. I am not all that bothered about th flight cancellation really, I mean it is sad that I will have to wait to see everyone, but there really isn't much point getting annoyed when the runway you were supposed to land on isn't even open and you wouldn't be able to be picked up in any case...

Well, it has snowed here now, though less than 6 inches in total I think. But still, everywhere is remarkably pretty.Vienna is well prepared for the snow, so there is much less of a festival atmosphere (you know, everyone rushing put to build a giant snow phallus in the 4 hours before the tube starts running again, etc). There are in fact no snow constructions of any description, but part of that is that because the temperature has stayed below zero since it fell, the snow is a powder rather than partially melted, so you can't squish it into snowballs. I took a stroll around during the snowstorm on Saturday, and the Heldenplatz did look very nice completely white. Christmas markets look nicer too, they seem a lot less tacky when everyone is standing in the bona fide snow and the little huts are covered in it. Although the market areas do develop this brown mud paste which is like the mother of all slushes. Mostly, you get the classic Vienna old couple out for a stroll, there will always be at least one fur coat between the pair and both will always be properly attired in a hat.

So, I don't know what I'll do tomorrow but I hope it's fun. I am currently reading the Moomin book I got for my birthday. It is every bit as good as I expected, though it does make me want to go run away and live on an island with a family of friendly troll creatures, which is not an easy career path to get onto... For music I have downloaded some Jeffrey Lewis, so I can laugh and smile inrecognition at his well worded, cute guitar songs about crushing insecurity and or punk and or hippies. He is great.

Merry nearly christmas!