…..er well, nothing that you can see actually. …….But then again, I guess the answer is in the photo. It’s bloody cold and bloody snowy.

This little weather station was a Christmas gift from David’s folks. As you can see, it’s telling the story but not in the way that the manufacturer intended!

On New Year’s Eve, after much prevarication, including an invitation to go out to supper with friends, we decided on a quiet night with a little walk up to the local pub in time to see in the New Year. Of course as always these plans get slightly wonky so after an impromptu meeting with neighbours in the pub we found ourselves in their home at 2am discussing, of all things, especially for a flibbertigibbet like me, weather stations.

John, our neighbour has an electronic weather station for our location that’s literally a few metres away from our home, the information from which he puts on his website. The site, now we know it’s there, has provided us with countless hours of fun as we’ve watched records (low temperatures) being set, not to mention the fact that we caught it out because it couldn’t tell the difference between melting snow and rain the other day as it recorded rainfall on a bright sunny day.

Anyway, David took our little analogue station out to see how closely the two correlate and we have discovered that we seem to be slightly colder most of the time…..though to be fair, we are further east and the weather has been coming in from the east since this cold snap began. We’re thrilled and fascinated by John’s venture and are chuffed to bits that we now know its secrets!

It was also good to see our house in another guise. Theirs is the same as ours except that over the last 110 years or so theirs has changed in different ways. They still have their original kitchen and original doors, whereas ours has been a bit more mutilated. Their kitchen explained a bit about ours – we could see the original fireplace & chimney that would have housed a Cornish range – ours has been destroyed long ago. We’re hoping to deliver a bit more of an authentic feel to ours by changing the replacement doors that we have for some that are more in line with the originals. Ours are horrible cheap six-panel doors that have been made bigger to fill the large doorframes. All we’ve done is to sand and fill them then paint them for now until we are in a position to do better but seeing the original doors in place we’re motivated to sort them out properly.

Our weather station is about as basic as you can get (without simply licking a finger and sticking it in the air), Johns is way up the ladder from ours and this one on the BBC is NASA sophistication. You can’t escape the fact though that they all say the same thing….. It’s bloody cold and bloody snowy.

Strangely enough it was sub-zero last year too....funnily enough, I didn't start my photo diary until March 2003 so my first ever Jan 6th piccy was one of my most successful of all time, to date, that image alone has been viewed over 10,000 times.....though the subject matter always gets lots of hits!