New House Attempted: It's only snow, you ponce!

When I woke up this morning the cats were confused. Or at least more confused than normal.

"It's like Narnia!" squealed my housemate.

Then I realised it: Cornwall was covered in snow - a rare thing for Cornwall. I threw on my army boots, which were even more confused than the cats, and headed out for a walk.


I used to think that Heaven was white, soft, like a land deep with snow. I suppose it's a fitting comparison. Cornwall was in freeze-frame this morning.

I looked across the fields between my house and Helston, where they say the devil flew with St Michael in pursuit. The borders of the lands were erased, and as I made my way I didn't know if I was walking on road or verge, grass or tarmac. That was the sense that held - the sense of walking where you wouldn't usually walk; doing what you wouldn't usually do. People were sledding on one of the hillsides, and a couple of girls were rolling a snowman's body. They were all trespassing, patches of errant people amid the whiteness.

Perhaps like heaven. The snow had made everywhere uncharted, virgin, and as I followed the footsteps I wondered what joys and energies had made those strides, what things had happened inside their heads.

It is enough not to know people, but to know that they have laughed as you've laughed, wondered as you've wondered. The same will hold in heaven.

The snow was the event that we all reflected from - perhaps like death for those in the afterlife. That's what communities are - that's what they should be - like those of Wartime or the days of invention, where single things brought us all together.

This morning a simple change in the geography had brought such. The voices I heard were distant, but all happy, all excited.

I know now that utopia may come; for how simple it was to bring that happiness: just a change, a covering of coloured powder, and then new energies arise, new happiness.

Did they feel it too - the sense of a land reclaimed? The borders were erased and with them had gone all sense of ownership. Is that why we are happy, because we give ourselves to the occupation of something else - that we embrace this check upon our miserable and aimless freedom?

History would warn us of this. But what if that thing we yielded to was unmistakeably beautiful, as beautiful as snowfall. Would it be different then?

And then something wonderful happened. I walked in the tyre-tracks on the road and the ground made a sound like empty crisp packets. And I thought, how wonderful that my readers would not understand this simile. They would picture it wrong, or think the simile weak or refrain from it altogether. How wonderful - something that cannot be described.

To think that there are things unknowable, unrelatable. How much more beauty there is in the world than what we relay to one another.

Is that why God keeps such a distance? Like virgin snow, couched in the unknown with the greater part of a universe we cannot share in words.

And yet, for all this, I would love nothing more than to share it with someone - to try at least, though I know it will be inadequate; though I know I would not say to her all I felt and we would not reach the emotional heights we dream of, or if we did we would not remember.

Yet still I would try, for hope that I would leave but one mystery in her heart, like virgin snow, like God unknowable; that she might count me among the greater beauty that lies beyond a shallow seeming.

Truly, as a thousand masters have told me, there is nothing better than to have a friend, a child, a loved one, whatever their capacity.

I need to know that people feel this - that they know and un-know the world as much as me and do not perch above their graves and let great things like waves crash apart around them.

I hope they felt this day as much as I did.