THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE WHITE RABBIT

The other day I chanced on an exceptional seasonal blog written by my dear friend ElizabethM who, in words and pictures, brilliantly described the sheer untainted beauty of the our current landscape-in-winter spectacle.

I commented then that I thought snow had a much greater effect on the world than just its property of making everything bask in a white glow; it's much more than just something that turns hedges into works of art (which Elizabeth had so very beautifully illustrated in her photographs). Rather it's as though we've turned the page of a magic book that takes us through a secret door and into the wonderful world of the White Rabbit.

Many of you will remember the 1950 film, starring the inimitable Jimmy Stewart, about a mythical white rabbit named Harvey. A six-foot,three-and-one-half-inch tall rabbit, in fact, invisible to everyone except Mr Elwood P. Dowd, a middle-aged, amiable (and somewhat eccentric) individual.

Harvey was a pooka, a benign but mischievous creature from Celtic mythology especially fond of social outcasts (like Elwood).
Elwood has driven his sister and niece (who live with him and crave normality and a place in 'society') to distraction by introducing everyone he meets to his friend, Harvey.

Eventually, the sister tries to have Elwood committed to an institution admitting inadvertently to the attending psychiatrist that, after so many years of putting up with the invisible rabbit, she herself sees Harvey every once in a while. This causes the psychiatrist to let Elwood out and lock the sister up instead. Confusion abounds.

It struck me the other day that the snow and ice now smothering Britain like one of those foaming spray on oven cleaners is itself in the nature of a mythical White Rabbit. It is our own collective Harvey, driving half the population mad while sending the other half into childhood regression and fantasy. Which, in the general scheme of things, is no bad thing.

Most of the time the rabbit - or the snow - isn’t there, but we still talk about it almost daily through the blank days of winter mud and rain. We wish for (or fear) its coming and pretend in mid-December that thick flakes of it are falling or will fall soon. The vitrines of our larger high streets turn this anticipation into an art form with industrial quantities of cotton wool reminding younger members of the population what this much heralded phenomenon is all about.

Depending on whether you have children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren you remember the winters of 1978, 1963 or even 1947. The years of course mean nothing to the young or the growing - ‘I could never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or twelve days and twelve nights when I was six’ - wrote Dylan Thomas - before going on to describe the liberating and educative effects of a gross snowfall on a child’s mind.

But, I wonder really if it is only a child’s mind that our snowy white Harvey actually liberates? At one level most of us are taken in by the sheer beauty of snow: the virginal, untouched, pristine loveliness of acre after acre of smooth and unbroken whiteness. Or by a forest of branches, laden with snow where twigs appear mere shadows sketched by some Heavenly hand to give definition to these ethereal white crystals.

This, though, is just the visible aspect of our pooka, the White Rabbit peeping out from behind the curtain once in a generation. The general and beneficial effects of snow run far deeper.

I notice the quietness immediately. The traffic has gone - or at least so much of it as to make a profound difference to the usual background bustle. People are walking again and as they walk they say ‘hello,’ and wish you well, much as they do on Christmas Day.

You can see children actually playing physically as opposed to hiding in their dangerously virtual worlds. Even the inebriates and binge drinkers seem to sober up. Beer cans and vodka bottles are not discarded into the hedges on a Friday night. Indeed, littering in general seems much reduced.

If you are still at work - or indeed a customer in a shop - there’s a shared complicity at having somehow defied the elements, a frontier spirit that immediately makes people more generous, as if we were all each others uncles and aunts with a family duty to support each other in adversity.

For people are simply nicer when it snows. And more philosophical, reflective. They have seen the White Rabbit and he has changed their perception of the world. Suddenly the hectic bustle of the January return to work, the winter heads-down of dark and busy days as we head towards the sunny uplands of Easter, has eased. With deep slow lying in most places, nothing seems quite so important. Snow metamorphoses into slow.

We think of others and of animals, too. The blackbird eating the berries of the Christmas wreath on the front door, excites sympathy more than anger, and concern for its welfare.

We can afford to be tolerant, self-indulgent; our White Rabbit is handing out excuses for days off and extra hours in a warm bed, while reminding us to provide unfrozen water and plenty of grain for the birds and to take extra care on the ice.

If, like the Eskimos we were permitted 64 words for snow, I’d make sure that the word for a large scale and enduring blanket of whiteness - a six-foot-three-and-one-half-inch rabbit that makes us a calmer and more gentle race - was ‘Harvey’.