SNOW DAY (and a half)

All of my friends around the world who are used to dealing with snow and ice regularly are more than welcome to point, laugh, giggle and perhaps even guffaw right now.

Yes, England isn’t particularly good when it comes to handling snow.  Winter tyres on cars?  Nope because we roughly seem to get two or three snow days a year and that is usually a very optimistic estimate.  I have known an entire decade to go by without a flake.
But here we are with severe weather warnings and much of the country grinding to a halt.  Still, least the sun’s out!

I live in Hampshire and work across the border in Dorset.  It’s about a 35 mile trip each way and I head across country roads to get there.  This particular part of Dorset seems to be fortunate that snow nearly always passes by, whereas the small village I live in tends to get the brunt of it.  This is fine if you are a schoolchild, or even a salaried employee but being self employed not being able to get out of the drive/road without skating several streets before even seeing a sniff of a gritter truck can cause some issues.

I went into work yesterday morning extra early, we had snow the night before so I slid around for a couple of roads before hitting the gritted ones and was away.  Then discovered that there was absolutely nothing in Dorset.  Not a flake, not even a frost on the road!  I got into work an hour earlier than usual.

But then I got a phone call from home around ten o’clock telling me to get home sharpish, the snow was coming down hard and drifting and all the while there was still nothing in Poole.
But then once I started making my way home the heavens opened and it was a race against time before things got a little….interesting.

By the time I rounded the corner just from home it was like this.  Captain Stupid stopped the car to take this, then wondered why it was a skid-fest to get going again.  The less said about trying to reverse the car onto the drive the better.  Non four wheel drive car reversing in snow is rather daft to say the least.
Needless to say, it was the first time in eighteen months that the A3 was left out of the garage overnight.

Heavy snow continued over the course of the next few hours so I just got online, connected to the work VPN and made sure everything was behaving as it should.
Overnight the temperatures plummeted to -8 centigrade (that’s about 18 for my fahrenheit friends) and this morning the village was an ice rink.  I steered clear of venturing out after inspecting the driveway and the road which was a solid sheet of ice.  But fortunately it did make for some nice photos when the sun came up.

After lunch we had much “hilarity” trying to defrost the car and the drive so I could get the car put away in the garage.  As soon as we poured hot water onto the snow and ice to defrost it, it would start to freeze again (particularly because we are on the shaded side of the street).  But fortunately after about an hour of back and forth I managed to get the car put away so hopefully unless we have another blizzard tonight I will be back to the office in the morning.

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Category: General, Personal