Snow in Portland

It hardly ever snows in Portland.  Two years ago, when we had just arrived, it snowed for the first time in eleven years, even on Chesil Beach which is covered in salt.  The children in the primary school had only seen snow in pictures.  Now, this year in the middle of January it snowed again.  We haven't even been here for three years and already it's snowed twice.  Could this be down to our Canadian heritage?  Friends advise us to keep quiet about it.  We could get attacked in the street, the weather we're having.  Luckily our accents have all but faded and we hardly ever wear our mukluks, although now is the time we need them most.

Chesil Beach

New's Year Eve

On New's Year Eve we go to The Cove House Inn.  It is the only house left standing from the original Chiswell village, most of which was washed away by the sea a century ago.  It looks like a cottage from the Yorkshire Moors, the white Portland stone turned to the colour of Millstone grit over the decades.  The sunsets from the front door are without compare and in the bars are pictures of shipwrecks and scavenged lobster pots.
Big Kev who works on the Oil Rigs tells us about the night in November a forty foot wave came over the shutters and washed his uncle, who couldn't swim, down the cellar stairs.  He survived but refused to come back here for twenty seven years.
There's free food and music for the regulars and a few people are wearing costumes.  One lady is there with her seven sons and they are all in fancy dress.  They come every New Year's.  There are men in black, a bat man and Mandy's son is John Lennon.  The pretty girls behind the bars are wearing wenches' outfits.   At midnight we hug and kiss everyone.  Kev's step daughter Amy gets tearful and his son Zak who has Downs syndrome is dancing up a storm.  He doesn't have speech but he communicates beautifully.  I join in until until the music is unplugged half way through a song.