4 flippin' hours to get home (25 miles) in about an inch of snow last night. This may come across as somewhat curmugeonly, but: If you know (because it's been trailed on the news for about a week) that there's snow on the way, put some petrol in your car. If you don't like driving in the snow, don't do it. People will give you lifts, there are trains and buses and so on; don't hold the rest of us up by trundling around at 5mph. If you're sliding, stop braking! When you see a hill, don't stop. Don't speed up. Don't change gear, revving furiously all the while. If you can't get going again in 1st, stop making ice patches; try 2nd. Honestly, we must be the most pathetic country in the world when it comes to dealing with a little bit of snow. (Of course, when I say 'we', I mean the southern English. Those of us who grew up in places where it snows quite regularly in the winter were the ones overtaking everyone else this morning - it was wet, not frozen, you... *spontaneously combusts*
I had to drive from Cumbria to Stratford-upon-Avon yesterday. Via Birmingham. Set off 4pm. Home at 11.00pm. I managed to avoid the B'ham gridlock, although I was delayed for a couple of hours on the M5. In the circumstances, I think I was lucky. But how I wish I'd seen the lighting storm!
And the poor chickens! They hate the snow and have remained tuck-tucked up in their hen-cot. I gave them extra portions of porridge this morning.
Ah, let's not get into the old "is snow a good thing or not?" debate, which as far as I can see generally splits neatly along the line that divides drivers from non-drivers. As a non-driving aesthetic type I naturally love snow and get very miserable when it goes. And I couldn't appreciate it last night for the 20 minutes that it existed because of a flatmate-related crisis (as usual). One day I shall live all alone in some kind of Arctic permafrost country. With a reliable Internet connection.
I do, don't I? Ghastly stuff. They're not attention-seekers though, honest. This one suffers from depression and rather unwisely allowed herself to run out of medication last week, with predictably awful results. Add to this the remarkably unhelpful support for mental health in this country - I took her to A&E (she was really in a bad way) on, I think Friday night, but they were unable to give her anything and insisted that she see somebody on Monday. Quite what she was meant to do for the weekend, on a downer from lithium cold-turkey, was not made clear. In other news, my other flatmate is surviving at the moment, despite being in the throes of an increasingly nasty court case with a certain major organisation currently in the news for its arrogance and intransigence. My other flatmates are moving out and I have to find replacements for them. It's at times like this that I'm glad I work nights sometimes.
[Bread] Not guilty, m'lud. I like snow. I like to look at it. I like to go out in it (sometimes in my slippers); I've even once been out in it wearing less than my slippers. I like watching it fall, and I like driving in it - it's peaceful, and (if you're in a country where they know about driving in the snow) there's a general feeling of "We're all in this together, isn't it fun?" I just don't like driving in it in the Home Counties. I'm currently overhearing a conversation about last night, in which one of my colleagues, who clearly has an automatic car, is relaying how she kept phoning her husband every ten minutes because she was stuck in a snowdrift or halfway up a hill, and she didn't know what all those 'other gears' might do. *sigh*