The Swedish weather service is forecasting around –10°C for tomorrow, with gusty wind and heavy snowfall all day, and issuing a “class 2 warning” meaning “weather conditions which can be expected to cause danger for the general public, major material damage and major disruptions to essential civic functions”.

I don’t mind the snow – I’m probably going to remember this winter fondly for the next twenty years. I don’t even mind shoveling and sweeping it. I do mind it all coming down at the same time so the streets are impassable and the trains are all late.

Here’s the fence along the front of our garden, as of about two weeks ago. Whenever a snow plough clears the street, most of the snow just gets pushed to the sides, which is what you see along most of the fence. The streets around here are relatively narrow to begin with, but wide enough for normal-sized cars to pass when meeting. Now there’s just enough space for one car. Whenever we (with stroller) meet a car, we make our way to the nearest driveway. Otherwise we’d have to climb up on that bank of snow, or risk watching the car get stuck in the bank on their side.

If we did nothing, we’d have a similar snow bank in front of our stairs and our mailbox. To make the stairs passable, and to make it possible to deliver our mail, we shovel that snow to either side, every time the street is ploughed. That’s what has lead to the sizeable pile of snow in the foreground. It now comes up to roughly chest height for me, so now I’m having to choose between lifting snow to that height, or walking a few yards with every shovelful. Just after shovelling the pile looks rather dirty because of the sand mixed into the snow, but since we have been getting at least a light dusting of snow at least once a week, it’s soon nice and white again.

Wherever possible, snow gets ploughed onto open spaces adjacent to roads: greens, squares, etc. On inner city roads, where there is really no space to leave the snow, the city sends lorries to transport it away, when there is at least a few days’t break in the snowfall and they have time. But now Stockholm is running out of places to put that snow. Snow from central Stockholm is tipped in the city’s waterways. Snow is considered waste, so tipping it in the water requires a dispensation from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, which the city has, but it’s now coming up against the volume limits for that dispensation. (600,000 cubic meters allowed, 450,000 cubic meters already utilized.) The city has been tipping snow in larger open spaces in the suburbs, but that’s of course not popular with those who live there – lots of noise from the heavy trafficy, ugly piles of dirty snow, worries about what will happen when it all melts, environmental concerns etc.