It’s cold out

You will mock, but it is cold down here in south-west Florida. I have just taken the dog out and I had to go and find some gloves.

This week Florida has seen snow settle on the ground in its northern parts and along the Panhandle. In the town of Milton northeast of Pensacola they saw 10 inches of snow. That’s more than double the previous state record of 4 inches, also in Milton in 1954.

We are 500 miles south of there but the temperatures in Sarasota are in the low single figures Celsius, and it’s expected to drop as low as 3c tomorrow morning. Local weather forecasters are even talking about the wind chill which takes the ‘feels like’ temperature to below freezing. Wind chill is a phrase rarely used in Florida.

I just told the dog that we will have to dig him out some gloves (he has a selection of coats) for tomorrow’s walk as there could be frost on the ground.

Today’s high will make 10c, ordinarily the low and high temperatures vary greatly here and a 20 degree daytime swing is not unusual whereas in Bermuda the dial only ever changed a couple of degrees even when it was raining sideways, which this time of year it has a proclivity to do.

Of course no one knows what to do with themselves down here when it’s this cold, the snow birds who flock here for the winter sun look particularly bewildered.