The message
from Sacha contains these words:

How's everyone else faring? We have had what were forecast as gales but
must be storm force at least in the gusts. In fact, we closed the Nursery
at 3pm because several panes of glass have crashed in on the little
conservatory and just as 3 customers walked down the big double greenhouse,
a huge guest of wind made the whole thing expand and contract and a pane of
glass crashed to the floor from about 17 feet up.

It's been torrentially wet here, but mild and no snow in our sheltered
neck of the woods. Impossible to do anything outdoors so we set off at
mid-day to go to a fundraiser soup-lunch-and-bookstall on the other side
of the island. A mile away, we started up into the hills of the colder
central zone and within a hundred yards found the rain falling as snow.
Still it wasn't bad so we kept going, noticing the strange lack of other
traffic. About a mile later the snow was very thick and slushy on the
road and I wanted to turn back, but it's a very narrow road and a
slippery manoevre right on the edge of an unfenced drop into the valley
didn't appeal..so we carried on up until flagged down by a police
landrover whose driver said "It's even worse further on; dead slow and
take care". It was :-(. We *crawled* over the hillside road, and
slithered down the far side, back to sea level and horizontal high
velocity sleet. After taking an hour to drive 13 miles, arrived at a
village hall to an exceptionally warm welcome as nobody else had turned
up. Had choice of three good soups, yummy home baking, and bought "Wild
gardens" by Jackie Bennett for 25p. We came home the unsnowy coastal
way, 35 miles, floody roads lined with flowering gorse. Still no snow
here :-)

Janet. (Arran)