Obligatory post banging on about the snow. Imagine your surprise.
I'm given to understand from the hysterical media (hysterical media is hysterical) that this is the worst winter since 1981/2. (Gloucestershire version, anyway) This rings true because I/we got some serious sledging in that time. We'd become bored with the field behind the house, I think because it wasn't quite steep enough and the snow had come from the other direction so that side of the field was more scrape than swish.
Small Brother's mate James (aka Dipstick, because he was an AF spanner in the box of metric sockets) had a complicated sledge built by his dad that used wide slabs of Formica as runners. As any fule no these days, given the number of moulded plastic items, it's all about spreading the load. Since this was rural Gloucestershire, and the shiny new learning about low ground pressure vehicles was still a gleam in the agricultural equipment supplier's eye, SB and self were rather startled by this. (Sb's sledge was a traditional narrow-runnered thing in the 'Rosebud' style.)
Because I had no sledge of my own (I know, I was a poor, deprived little sod) I blagged some Formica and boshed one out of 2x4 and whatever else was in the shed(s) the night before. The road up the side of the hill from Charlton Pool to the Camps is straight and about 1 in 5 at its steepest. Conveniently, that was the bit most exposed to the wind, so the snow was in lumpy drifts to the height of the hedge. It had also frozen, so it was an ideal surface for propelling teenagers who should have been in school head-first into whatever was in the way, closely followed by the sledge that they'd just been bounced off.
A few years after that, I discovered that Mk2 Escorts are bloody twitchy on hard-packed snow. Good job there was no bugger around to see that 180.
Which more-or-less leads me to the point. I rather like snow. It's fun to play in and makes the grimmest place look cleaner. However, I'm packed in with a thousand fuckwits who can't drive, don't carry shovels and don't understand that ABS won't save you if there's no traction at all.
Look, the bargain we make when we move into a town is that in exchange for using up less space, not keeping old cars, not setting fire to things.. Y'know, not having any fun[1] basically... is that the Powers That Be will take the rubbish away (no bonfires), keep the streets clean and generally mind the infrastructure for the good of all.
If they're not going to do that, what's the bloody point? Bastards.
[1] Buying things is not 'fun'.
Small Brother's mate James (aka Dipstick, because he was an AF spanner in the box of metric sockets) had a complicated sledge built by his dad that used wide slabs of Formica as runners. As any fule no these days, given the number of moulded plastic items, it's all about spreading the load. Since this was rural Gloucestershire, and the shiny new learning about low ground pressure vehicles was still a gleam in the agricultural equipment supplier's eye, SB and self were rather startled by this. (Sb's sledge was a traditional narrow-runnered thing in the 'Rosebud' style.)
Because I had no sledge of my own (I know, I was a poor, deprived little sod) I blagged some Formica and boshed one out of 2x4 and whatever else was in the shed(s) the night before. The road up the side of the hill from Charlton Pool to the Camps is straight and about 1 in 5 at its steepest. Conveniently, that was the bit most exposed to the wind, so the snow was in lumpy drifts to the height of the hedge. It had also frozen, so it was an ideal surface for propelling teenagers who should have been in school head-first into whatever was in the way, closely followed by the sledge that they'd just been bounced off.
A few years after that, I discovered that Mk2 Escorts are bloody twitchy on hard-packed snow. Good job there was no bugger around to see that 180.
Which more-or-less leads me to the point. I rather like snow. It's fun to play in and makes the grimmest place look cleaner. However, I'm packed in with a thousand fuckwits who can't drive, don't carry shovels and don't understand that ABS won't save you if there's no traction at all.
Look, the bargain we make when we move into a town is that in exchange for using up less space, not keeping old cars, not setting fire to things.. Y'know, not having any fun[1] basically... is that the Powers That Be will take the rubbish away (no bonfires), keep the streets clean and generally mind the infrastructure for the good of all.
If they're not going to do that, what's the bloody point? Bastards.
[1] Buying things is not 'fun'.