It’s Grim Up North!
I am a soft Southerner and a proud Londoner to boot, with the tough genes of a true mongrel. But especially after today’s weather reports from Jockshire, no sane man or woman would want to live north of Cambridge. I might make an exception for Liverpool, as I like my culture to have an edge.
Are We All a Load of Softies?
I’m not asking the question, by my stallion is.
Vague Shot in the Snow
Lookm at him here, with his backside into the wind. He’s 27 years old now, which is a good age for a horse, but he is still hale and hearty and he lives out most of the year. At the moment, he does come in at night, but that’s only because of the cold.
One thing, I’ve always wanted to do is put a proper camera on his head, to film what he sees in the fields. As he likes to think he’s protecting his herd, he is always watching for movement. Would the camera catch the deer, foxes and hares that pass through his field?
The Weather Must be Bad!
The BBC has just had a report from Hull abut the awful conditions there.
I thought that Hull was one of those places where the weather usually didn’t get that cold and snowy. If that memory is correct, then this cold spell must be bad!
Visits to This Blog
I would have thought that traffic would have been higher in the last couple of days or so, as people would be sitting at home with nothing to do, as they would have decided that going out wouldn’t be worth it. After all, with freezers, I suspect that there are a lot less people who need to go to the shops every day. And those who can, are working from home.
But since last Friday, when the weather started to get really cold, the traffic has been well down. I have also received very few e-mails, serious or spam, so perhaps everybody are just concentrating on keeping life together and are not at their computers.
It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the weather and the amount of Internet traffic.
The Basset Has Given Up on the Weather
She spent the whole of yesterday indoors and was only persuaded to venture outside for a few minutes.
This morning, she has just got up and reluctantly she went out of the front door for perhaps a minute. Now she is back on the rug in front of the sofa, wondering if she’ll try her luck. She didn’t and now she’s lying in front of the AGA.
A Cloud
I’ve just photographed this cloud through the window of the hotel.
A Cloud
To illustrate how fleeting this image was, I took another a few minutes later.
A "Not-So-Good" Cloud
Gritting Priorities
It was interesting to hear on Radio 5 last night from Alistair Kight of GRITIT and the fact that people are stealing salt supplies. He was also very critical of local and national government, who only had very inadequate supplies and have thus added to the chaos.
He has a point.
Surely, we should have enough supplies to keep all the main and most of the secondary roads open for a month. Where I live I’ve never seen a gritter at all on the fairly steep up and down, that leads to the main road. Surely, it should have been done at least once, as the road leads to some elderly and seriously ill people.
But then we vote Conservative in this area, so there are no votes for Prudence in giving my council enough money to provide adequate services.
I was in London yesterday and they were gritting the paths of Regents Park.
Gritting in Regents Park
So at least we have our priorities right!
An Afternoon Walk in the Snow
I took a walk this afternoon. It was cold and sunny.
The aim of the walk was to take a suitable picture for next year’s Christmas card.
Did I get the picture? Who’s to know!
An Elan on Skis?
I took the X-Type to Sainsburys this afternoon and the temperature gauge was showing minus eight. Don’t ask me what that is in old money, as I don’t do Fahrenheit.
It was probably lucky that I took the Jaguar as someone had got themselves stuck and needed a tow off the snow-covered grass. Not that the car would have been any good at it, as it wasn’t getting any grip on the ice, but I did have a tow rope, which meant that someone else in a Nissan Terrano could do the honours and remove the BMW.
Since the weather has got bad I’ve been alternating the two cars; the Jaguar X-Type and the Lotus Elan.
These pictures show the conditions and a couple of pictures to prove the Elan got safely to Newmarket and back.
By preference, I’d take the Elan every time on this sort of surface. Especially as the lane to the main road into Newmarket, hasn’t been gritted at all and is a fairly steep incline down and then up both ways. It’s also very much single track as the photo shows and you need to go slowly to avoid hitting someone going the other way, as hedges and a couple of bends make the road dangerous. In the last eighteen years, that I have lived in this house, I reckon that there have been about one serious accident a year. I’ve been hit thrice; by the postie, a lady who didn’t get over at all and a lunatic.
Today, I took the Lotus in with the top down and perhaps that was just too ambitious, despite the fact I was well wrapped up. What the car needs is a proper tonneau cover!
All of this shows, that if you take a modern car like the X-Type with lots of clever electronics and anti-lock braking, it is no better than a car which was designed with proper dynamics in the first place.
I should say that I’ve driven cars a lot worse on snow and ice than the Jaguar, but good dynamics are the key to everything, when it comes to roadholding on surfaces, that are good, bad or just plain terrible!
The Anonymous Widower 