The gritters have been out every night for the last 24 nights now, but they’ve still not come down our street. After a brief melting clear-up over Christmas week the snow came back this week, and by yesterday afternoon we had a good five inches of the stuff in the garden. The poor chickens were scratching their way through it, trying to find the grubs on the floor of their run, and their water is freezing every day, which makes for some early morning dousing with the kettle. Not good when you’re rushing to work.
Except we’re not rushing to work. We’ve both been working at home since Wednesday, and I have to say that looking at the same screen all that time is starting to drive me a little stir crazy.
The trouble is, you start at eightish rather than your regular start time, and you finish… well, whenever you’ve finished what you need to do, which means that we’ve been working ten or so hours a day. Great for the productivity – not so great for the sanity.
I wasn’t actually going to write about the snow because it’s all a bit British obsessionish, isn’t it. The weather, I mean. It’s been leading all the news bulletins, though, and everyone is saying ‘ooh, it’s like 1963/1981′, so I guess I ought to put something down for when people start asking where I was during the great 2010 snow-in.
Here’s a picture from Nasa:
Pretty comprehensive, isn’t it.
The scientific explanation is Siberian gales sweeping in from the north-east which means, rather unusually, that the weather is coming in by way of Norfolk rather than Cornwall and Wales. Hence the severity. Norfolk is quite flat and there’s nothing to stop it.
Last night marked a record low of -22 degrees. Not here, fortunately, where it’s been down to the mid-teens, but a few hundred miles north.
Actually, we’ve probably been colder than mid-teens but the rules for measuring it have changed (the local rag reliably informs me). You’re not allowed to brush the snow off your sensor now, apparently, so if it gets covered up then it no longer accurately records the air temperature, but the warmer reading under the snow. Spoilsports.
It’s certainly turned the outhouse into a good walk-in fridge. Even with an oil-filled radiator in there chugging away 24 hours a day, the warmest we can make it right now is one degree. One paltry degree. Still, it’s keeping all our food nice and fresh and at least the pipes aren’t bursting in the laundry room.
They’ve started rationing gas to big factories so that there’s plenty left for domestic users, but if things start to get really tight and they start rationing home users, too, we’ll have to move the radiator into the house and sit around it at close quarters. I don’t like to think what’ll happen to our home-made yoghurt then.
We’ll probably risk frostbite and fractured elbows with a walk up to the pub this evening to get ourselves out of the house.
Wish us luck.
