Of course as soon as we have more than a few nanometres of snow the entire country grinds to a shuddering halt. Not your dragon of course who owns one of those evil planet destroying 4x4 so can negotiate the admittedly slippy and snowy roads we have whilst lesser mortals spin their wheels and slide around everywhere, much to the irritation of folks like me and no doubt Steve over at Natural Yoghurt (who drives a big bus and therefore will know how to drive in snow) when they pull out just in front of us forcing us to use the brakes which always makes the driving suddenly get a whole load more interesting.
And following on swift wings of a snowfall is the bleating in the dead-tree press about how crap we are in the snow and how come when there's so much as a snowflake the country just stops and how it's not like this elsewhere on the continent.
Well I can tell you that the latter is not true as I was in The Netherlands just before Xmas and they got a bit of snow, 10cm or so - all the trains stopped running and the guy from the ANWB (kind of like the RAC or AA but with clogs on) kept popping up on the telly saying "Aaarg! Roads blocked! Do not go out! Very dangerous! The sex shop in Groningen has run out of dog porn1"
However listening to BBC Local Radio this morning the poor sodding presenters had to read out the entire list of closed schools - all 260 of them which was more than half of the entire county. Now this was for Norfolk which has hardly had any snow at all. The only time as a hatchling I can remember our school closing was during the oil crisis in the 70's when they ran out of heating oil for the boilers. Even in the last big snows in '81 I seem to remember trudging through the snow to school as the school buses were not running.
My guess is that if there is even a vague chance of Chaveera or Tyson falling over on a square millimetre of ice or the risk of "Anti Social Snowball Throwing"2 which would lead, naturally, to some sleaseball chav chancer suing the LEA for millions the head teacher errs on the side of caution and shuts the place.
So school shut, mumsie and dadsie have to stay home to look after the brood and guess which childless little green dragon has to battle it in against ungritted roads and "emergency snow-fall timetables" with only a bobble hat on my horns.
Still the wuppies like it...
1 My Dutch language skills are not exactly brilliant so I might have mistranslated that last bit.
2 Seriously I heard the presenter on the local tv news say that yesterday, preceded by "Police had to be called to deal with..." Fuking Hell.
2 comments:
I read an article once about car drivers in snowy Scandinavia. They do not go in for 4X4's and simply use regular front wheel drive small hatchbacks. I have no problems driving my Citroen C3 in snow. Any driver, if they put their brain into gear rather than their ego, can drive a regular 2 wheel drive car in snow and ice.
Nice to see the new photos of Loki and Freyja - they haven't half grown!
To be honest I only have the 4x4 because I needed something hunky to haul trailers and horseboxes around and across fields so I needed something with a bit of grunt and the Landcruiser fits the bill nicely (and it upsets the eco-weenies: double WIN)
The wuppies have grown somewhat - they weighed in at 22 and 24 kilos on the 2nd of January, they should make 40kg by the time they are 18 months. At least they can go the whole night without taking a dump now - very happy dragon as mopping up poo at 5.30 was not my most favourite task.
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