This is the very centre of Reading, the hotel is between the railway station and the main shopping street. Our office is outside the town in a business park where it is necessary to take a bus, and on Wednesday that bus stopped running! So we asked the hotel for a meeting room, fortunately they had one spare, and we spent the rest of the week there. Most of the shops in Reading were closed, so it was a good thing I had gone to John Lewis and WH Smith on the Sunday afternoon when I arrived - at least I had something to read, and I also bought some Debbie Bliss Donegal Tweed that was on sale. £5.95 per 100 grams, it would be twice that in France, and they certainly would not have had 20 skeins of gorgeous purple flecked colour here. It's going to turn into a tweedy jacket, ideal for spring in Tallinn.

I was slightly nervous about getting back, aince Eurostar had problems again, but I turned up early at St Pancras, and they put me on the next train, so I got home a bit earlier than I was scheduled to, even though the train stopped at Ashford for technical reasons and also at Calais, to let people off. St Pancras did not seem to be as shambolic as it was shown on tv the day before, they were well organised, putting colour-coded stickers on people's tickets, and just announcing "Red train to Paris boarding now", "Green train to Brussels" and so on. The only thing was that there was no bread with meals, they hadn't been able to get any, but they were showering us with chocolates and champagne, so everyone was quite happy.

The tv reports and the newspapers in the UK were treating the snow as a national disaster, so much so that I had email from my sister saying that my mother had rung to find out if she had heard from me, or was I stranded somewhere. So I called Mummy last night to tell her that it was all much exaggerated in my opinion, and everyone should have been out shovelling instead of sitting inside moaning about the weather. Tallinn would be shut for six months a year if the same sort of behaviour prevailed there.

In Paris today, in fact we have snow, which seems to have started falling overnight and is still doing so - it is pretty quiet, but I expect that buses and so on are running, at least inside the city, there may be some perturbations in the suburbs. I am off to the hairdressers after I've had something to eat, and I may look in at Le Bon Marche to see if there's anything nice on sale (memo to self, do NOT NEED any more handbags), but that will be the extent of my deplacements for the day.