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At the back end of last year, five of us who knew each other at university got together for dinner for the first time in ages. We brought along our respective other halves, and had a jolly evening eating curry in a house in St John's Wood.

Four of the couples live in London(ish, if you count St Albans). The fifth has taken up residence in Munich and, recently, bought a holiday home in Austria. A general invitation was issued to visit them, which I mentally filed as the sort of polite thing people say.

However our Christmas card this year, and then a follow-up email, suggested we really should visit. ChrisC and I had said we were learning to ski (in the snow dome at Milton Keynes), would we like to visit before the end of the ski season and try some real snow?

We consulted air fares, compared calendars, and decided we would. An adventure! )
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This morning, the London Eye (née Millennium Wheel) was advertising free rides for people in the queue before 0930. We figured that a ride on the Eye in the (forecast) snow would be pretty, so bounded out of bed uncharacteristically early.

While queueing, we idly wondered whether a wooden structure - just visible over a small, marble-clad wall and some hedges - was Art or a climbing frame. Being of an enquiring nature, I hopped up onto the wall to look.

My knees are a bit shoddy at the best of times, and the usually-sound one is currently in a rather sorry state (see bicycle, falling off sideways), meaning I hopped up rather awkwardly. And the thing about marble covered in slush? It's quite slippery. Also, marble is quite hard on one's shins, elbows, face, etc.

Anyway, it had started to snow (bang on the forecast time of 9am), but not in an attractive way. Tiny, spiteful pinheads of ice settled round us. By the time it was our turn on the Eye, London had settled into a rather unappealing grey. I'd taken my new toy with me[*] but results are disappointing )
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Recently, I saw a display of cheap inflatables intended for swimming pools. A ring with a horse's head, a dolphin. The seams of the plastic stuck out, rather than being nicely taped flat.

And suddenly I remember standing in the North Sea on seaside holidays, and the feeling of such a seam scraping across legs made cold and goosebumped by the water (my inflatable ring was yellow with a horse's head, from memory, although given the colouring it might have been a giraffe). As sensations go it was actually quite painful, but very distinctive and something which - in a life which rarely involves swimming in bodies of cold water and even more rarely involves inflatables - I haven't felt in years.

I set myself to wondering what other sensations might have got lost in the last few decades. The one that immediately sprung to mind was grazed knees )

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