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In retrospect, I consider myself very lucky after what happened last night, but more on that later.

I got up early yesterday morning - well before the sun - to give the bathroom a second coat. Second coats are always far easier because there’s a good base colour already on the ceiling and walls. Only trouble is, once I’d finished I realised I wasn’t going to be able to shower until it had dried, so drove through the hectic traffic, almost crashing as a guy reversed across a junction I was turning into.

So, a fairly ordinary desk day with a couple of pusher meetings, lots of gazing out of the window with the rest of the team as we oohed and aahed at the snow falling in excited flurries. It was too pretty, and too novel, for me to even think what it would mean as far as going home was concerned - until I set out on the long walk to Euston, which is becoming a daily event while the Central Line is closed.

By the time I arrived I was frozen, and I barely cared that there were no trains indicated on the boards - at least I was somewhere warm. After half an hour of standing arround with no information, though, the novelty was starting to wear off. Seems tube trains don’t run well in the snow.

I made Liverpool Street an hour and a half after leaving the office (2 mile journey) and caught the 19h32 just as it was preparing to leave. It was the start of a long journey.

I’m glad the the mad old woman got off at Shenfield. She had been repeating again and again that this was (a) like the snows of 1947 (b) not nearly as bad as the fog of 1955 when the trains crashed at Gidea Park or (c) not bad weather at all - people today don’t know they’re born - she likes the cold and will go home to a house with no heating and not feel at all.

Had she still been sitting across the aisle from me when we were trapped out in the middle of nowhere for 45 minutes in a snowstorm outside Ingatestone I would probably have had to throw her through a window. As it was, it was bad enough that the HSBC man opposite was snoring, the woman in the bun-hair was reading aloud from her ‘Lowdown on face lifts and wrinkle reduction’ book and the heating switched itself off.

As the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, throwing around the snow-heavy branches outside the window. Unable to sleep or concentrate on my AvantGo pages, I sat there trying hard not to read bank statements over the shoulder of the guy sat next to me. He’d been bragging about how rich he was, how he was an oil investor, and how he owned a third of the leading chain of coffee houses in South Africa.

I arrived home at ten in the end - four hours after leaving the office on a journey of not much more than 30 miles. There was a little grey rabbit sitting in the snow outside the car park. It was huddled into an unsure ball, rocking back and forth on its haunches and wheezing. I came so close to picking it up, but would have been unable to do anything for it even if I had taken it home, so reluctantly left it for nature to take care of one way or the other.

Of course, I was in no mood for sleeping after that, so pulled up the bathroom carpet and drank tea.

I really only intended to get the floor prepared for carpet laying at the weekend, but in the end took up the vicious rods of nails that hold down the carpet along the bottom of the walls and removed the underlay, too.

Then cut the new carpet to fit.

Then fit it.

I quite surprised myself, and probably made several neighbourly enemies by hammering down the edges just after midnight. I was hooked on the radio, though, and the reports coming in from across the east, and the longer I listened the more surely I realised I had been left off very very lightly. There were people who had travelled less than five miles in six hours, motorways blocked by jack-knifed lorries, and appeals for anyone near the blue Vauxhall on the M11 who had any food to get there quick and help as the guy inside - snowed into position like everyone else - was diabetic.

I hit the duvet at one, finally, and woke up a full seven hours later to reports of delays and disruption. Switched over to the BBC local at five past, and they spent from then until almost 8.30 - a full 25 minutes - reading out a long list of schools that had been closed by the weather.

Online travel reports reiterated one thing - stay at home - again and again and again.

So, I returned to my bathroom carpet, and finished the fineries of the fitting. Painted the bathroom cabinet and tidied away all the clutter and mess left behind by a week of DIY. It’s difficult to believe so small a room could make so much mess.

All through the morning the tales of woe flowed in. The drivers stuck on the M11 last night were still there. One man called the radio. He was 3 miles from Stanstead, the airport from which he’d set out 14 hours ago after a transatlantic flight.

I can think of very little any worse than what he must have been feeling: tired, hungry and freezing cold. Uncomfortable hours compounding the effects of his jet lag.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 31st, 2003 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.