We had a sprinkling of snow in Timperley last Saturday morning. It's still here, a week later, during which week the temperature has hardly risen above freezing.
On Thursday I wandered along the towpath to Sale, passing the Walton Perks cafe boat en route. The boat, along with others nearby, was frozen into the thick ice that currently coats the canal, but there was no sign of any coffees being sold.
The frost has remained intact all week in the shade, but bright sunshine from the clear blue skies has led to evaporation in places.
The path beside Sinderland Brook isn't necessarily in the shade, but this is how it looked on Friday, after a fresh bout of hoar frost.
There was a mini family reunion in Chortlon thanks to trains being cancelled for some family members, leading to long journeys by car to collect/visit/etc other family members. Isabella was wandering around people who were strangers to her, armed with a purple helium balloon. Hello Izzie, you were very well behaved.
Later on Friday, Sue and I were at Sale Waterside for a concert by
GreenMatthews - Chris Green and Sophie Matthews, who badge themselves as
modern-day balladeers, specialising in telling stories through song. Some of their instruments are home made, and Sophie uses English bagpipes that apparently pre-date the Scottish versions by several hundred years!
An excellent performance.
Saturday is 'parkrun day'. After a week of freezing conditions, all our local parkruns were iced off apart from Woodbank, in Stockport, which always runs, even if you have to do five laps around the 1km perimeter of a field! So we went there, arranging to meet Jan. On arrival a few minutes before the 9am start, we saw that the direction signs had been put up, so the run would be on. Or would it? A shower of freezing rain at about 8:15 had turned the surface into an ice rink, so regretfully the organisers had to abandon. They were very apologetic. I suppose we will always be able to say "We were there when Woodbank cancelled", by way of a novelty comment in the future.
Anyway, the rain eased, so we met up with Jan at Wythenshawe Park and did a 5km+ run mainly around the perimeter of the park. Here we are in the car park before setting off.
And here are Jan and Sue on a path outside the park.
It's pretty clear why the run was cancelled, as it uses the river of ice pictured below. As there were only three of us, we could run on the grass, but this would certainly have presented problems for over 200 parkrunners.
Sue and Jan went a different way, but I made it to 5km by passing Oliver's statue opposite the Hall, before finishing at the otherwise deserted cafe.
Coffee and cake (thanks Jan) went down well, and one of the staff kindly took the next picture. Well, at the time they had no other customers.