How can I lose two 18″ rulers in my studio? All I could find was my old typographer’s ruler, which I haven’t used for years. I can tell you that this morning, having cleared a path to the studio from last nights download of snow, the snow is 650 point deep in the garden.

It was 650 points deep on the drive too. Our drive is quite steep, so it needs clearing quickly before the snow gets wet and too heavy or to trodden and compacted to clear.

This year I was prepared. I’d made up a snow shovel with thin ply and a stick. I will redesign this. It needs a longer handle to get more leverage on wet, heavy snow.

I discovered the best way was to work in chevrons across the drive. There is hardly anywhere left to put the snow! In snowy countries, they put snow tyres on for the winter. Here we poison the place with salt and grit so that the drains will block up for summer flooding.

Cars spray snow all over the pavements, so there is nowhere for pedestrians and no where left to shovel the snow. In the grand tradition of a quick tidy up, (i.e. bunging everything on the sofa) I found the garden bench a very useful place to dump some of it!