A little light drizzle.

Well, it's pretty grim here in England at the moment. The sky is a flat grey and it's been drizzling for what seems an eternity.

A couple of weeks back we visited our friends John and Carol in Switzerland. Were we foolish to expect to find snow there? Phil always jokes that his cloud follows him wherever we go and I was feeling pretty smug on our last trip to SA when we had beautiful clear blue skies every day, but Switzerland turned out to be (weather-wise) more like Birmingham. In fact, while we were there, the South of England experienced unprecedented snow-storms whilst Switzerland was bathed in tepid rain with leaden skies -much as we are here right now. People seem to think that global warming is going to lead to the UK being like the Med, but in reality it's more likely to be like, erm, the UK only even more wet and slightly warmer.

In search of snow (and in no small part the desire to show Archie, when he is older, pics of him and his wheels in both the sands of the Kalahari and the snow of the Alps), we headed for the hills. Mount Titlis to be exact. We'd never heard of the place, but it seems to be a popular spot and the mountain has its own website (www.titlis.ch). There was also a distinct shortage of snow, but realising that we were cold (duh!), we headed off to the nearest ski shop and hired ourselves some ski pants.

Suitably attired, we purchased our toboggan passes and took the gondola lift up to the toboggan run at 1300m. Archie was completely unfazed by the cable car but drew the line when we tried to get his thermal mitts on his hands. In his eyes, it was bad enough wearing a snowsuit but the gloves were the final straw. We had an ongoing battle with this one throughout the day. Archie was born in 32 degrees of heat in July. Whilst this would not be an unusual temperature in many parts of the world, it's not common in the UK - even on the South Coast and young Archie spent the first few weeks of his life in sleeveless and legless baby suits and that's how he truly believes he is meant to be dressed ALL THE TIME. He doesn't object to getting dressed, he just objects to wearing clothes, full-stop. The most "chilled" we've ever see him was parking off in his nappy in the Kalahari. The most chilled we've seen him was at the bottom of the 3.5km toboggan run when he realised he couldn't feel his hands any more. Before anyone complains about child cruelty, he wasn't on his own on the toboggan (he's only 7 months old, for God's sake!!) and he did have the gloves on his hands at the top of the run, he just wouldn't let them stay there. He arrived with daddy at the bottom of the run with the same dead-pan bored expression he wore in the ski-lift. Honestly, there's no pleasing some children... He only did the one run - very slowly - and spent the rest of the time catching snowflakes on his tongue and being entertained by Mummy or Daddy whilst the other parent was hurtling down the hill.

Elsewhere in the day, Phil managed to nearly castrate himself in a downhill toboggan fight with Carol. Neither person won, but Phil nearly lost more than the contest and quite a few trees on the route also bear scars from the conflict. We also marvelled at the idiosyncrasies of ski resort catering when 2 tiny, miserable-looking, reformed chicken schnitzels and chips cost the same as a delicious roast pork dish with mustard sauce and fresh vegetables.



It was disappointing to see how little snow there was on the mountain. Over the other side of the valley at the same level there was no snow at all. The toboggan run was artificially frosted and by the end of the day it was wearing very thin, resulting in a bumpy ride and plenty of bruises on the backs of the legs. Still, we'd gone to Switzerland in search of snow and we did find some. One can only speculate about how much real snow will be falling in future seasons.