Alley Alley Aster.

Remember when as a child you watched those first snow flakes tantalisingly start to fall, and wished with all your heart and soul for it to keep going. We had a rhyme for the occasion, and our little street gang would all look up to the skies like a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses on judgement day, chanting “Alley Alley Aster Snow Snow Faster”.

Not exactly a Keatsian eulogy I know, and I’ve no idea who Alley Aster is, but we believed that if said repeatedly and long enough with increasing volume it could affect the weather to our advantage.

Sometimes it worked and we’d be rewarded with enough snow to go sledging down the roly-poly hill, so called because in dryer weather you could do a roly-poly down it, hoping you didn’t go through any dog muck.

Anything would do as a sledge, a bit of old lino, a redundant milk crate, or if you were lucky, a ‘real ‘ one made from some old wood with six inch nails, that would have the elf  ‘n’ safety police round today.

Pulling sleeves down over numbed hands, we’d have snowball fights with the enemy kids from the next street, who had some good shots and if you weren’t careful you’d cop for one right on your lug ‘ole, leaving it throbbing for a good ten minutes.

Arriving home, looking like a drowned chimpanzee with sleeves trailing to the floor, you’d get a clout on the other ear for not coming in and putting some ‘proper’ clothes on. “You’ll get double pneumonia you will my lad!”,  my Mother would say, with a dire warning not to put reddened feet  too near  the fire, for fear of getting the ‘hot aches’.

Sadly, when it snows these days such childhood nostalgia gets washed away in a tide of pragmatism, and now I despair at not being able to get things done down at the plot for example. Oh, and when I did that triple lutz the other day, whilst clearing the footpath yet again, I could have strangled that bloody Alley Aster!