I hadn't appreciated just how far things had deteriorated with regard to winter snow until I looked up weatherspark.com and found hour by hour data for nearby Manston Airport.
A nice bit of nostalgia there!
I'm only 44, but already
some of the old weather lore has gone, perhaps for the rest of our lives. There were several bits passed down via my gran (who was from the Fuggle farming family, they had a type of Kentish hop named after them):
When snow is fine, there's more behind(Last seen - a couple of weeks ago! The snow from that easterly started out as tiny flakes, but later in the day heavier, fluffier flakes arrived. Those were the ones that gave a painfully brief dusting)
When snow hangs around, it's waiting for more(Or a fancier version, I can't remember the exact words. If it's cold enough for snowcover to persist for a few days, the likelihood is it'll be cold enough for more, either from showers or a warm front from the breakdown)
It's "practice" snow(Again, there would have been a fancier version. I remember this many times in the 80s, I would be a bit upset that the small amount of snow we had was melting, but my mum (via my gran, no doubt) would assure me heavier, deeper snow was on the way. And it usually was!)
This all ties in with what you're saying - while we remember the deep snow of the 80s, there were several times where we had snow on the ground even without a Scandinavian high in full swing, perhaps from a front clipping the south, or even in a brief northerly after a low had moved away. That's the joy of being on the right side of the snow/rain divide, but little did I appreciate it at the time... I thought it was always going to be that way.
In January 1984 we got snow showers on a WSW'ly for goodness sake.
Ah yes, the famed "cold zonality". I have a photo of 4-year-old me in my nan's back garden, near Gravesend, with snow on the ground. It would have been taken during that winter.
I've said for the past 15 years on here that there's no such thing as "cold zonality" (it used to come up quite a bit), and there isn't any more down here. It's why those up north (e.g. Manchester) should really make the most of what they have... as what's happened here will happen there soon enough the way things are going.
Its the little things...I found a video from 31/1/1991 this morning of snow in Southern England.....hang on I thought the snow didn't arrive until February but sure enough there it was, a low pressure system was pushing eastwards into the country into cold air that was slowly establishing ahead of the main event a week later.
Yes, I remember it snowing at school in that week, we were all disappointed about the way we ended up with a heavy dusting rather than anything more. (My mum, when I moaned about it, assured me it was the usual "practice snow", and it was. Whether the models had picked up on what was about to happen, I don't know!)
I can still remember, incidentally, when the rot set in. It was autumn 1987, and I was excited at the thought of more snow to come (as the preceding years, as far back as I could remember, had had inches of the stuff on the ground). I was 8.
I asked my gran how much snow we might get that winter, and she
laughed! She said some winters it doesn't snow at all, and it might not that winter. I thought she was mad, loopy, senile, but she was spot on. We didn't have any snow that winter, and it was much worse than finding out that Father Christmas didn't exist. (I figured that out at the age of 5, then was begged by my mum not to spoil it for my friends!)
The rot may have set in, but the winter didn't break just yet. 1991 saw lots of snow, so did November 1993 - over 6 inches, but the school bus still came. Then there was the duo of 95 and 96, the latter with a wonderful easterly which had snow on the marshes for all of January 97. And after that, a long, long wait until 2005, and even that was marginal as hell really... we had 2 weeks with snow every day, and snow on the ground throughout, but further east (Thanet, Dover etc) there was very little.
I don't claim to know what the future holds, but on current trends you'd have to be gloomy, at least down here. I guess it means when (if!) we get another proper easterly we'll all be documenting it, cherishing it, as we may never see the likes again in our lifetimes. (The great weather historian Philip Eden, who said the 2005 easterly would be the last true easterly, certainly won't see another - he died of dementia in January 2018, ironically just a few weeks before the Beast from the East, a very short but brutally cold easterly.)