Yesterday afternoon and evening it snowed in Brussels. It was funny to see the excitement this caused, as reflected in many Facebook entries. Clearly, snow in Brussels has become a rare occurence. When I got back home from the office in the evening, I had a snowball fight in the garden with my wife and son (my daughter wisely stayed indoors). The snow was of a perfect consistency for making snowballs that held together during their trajectories and shattered satisfyingly on impact. Great fun! Inevitably, the experience triggered childhood memories and, tracing these back, I realised that snowball fights had become rarer and rarer as snow became an increasingly rare phenomenon in London. When I first came to Belgium, in 1980, there were cross-country ski stations dotted throughout the Ardennes. Now, you have to look very hard to find such a place. As weather patterns come and go, so do industries.