There’s Nothing more Galling…

… than deciding something’s absolutely impossible, and then seeing someone doing it.

I woke up in a slightly better mood this morning (I was a bit grumpy yesterday, wasn’t I?) We’d escaped the promised heavy snow, and got a light icing-sugar dusting instead, plus bright sunshine and blue skies and everything all sparkling again. And, even though all of the schools in the county are closed, due to it being a bit nippy, the gritter lorry has been! And the bin men! We went out for a walk – playing spot the piece of grit; they haven’t exactly been lavish with it, understandably – and we could actually walk instead of stagger. We had got as far as the Cottage-that-sells-eggs and turned back into the biting wind when what did we see coming down the icy hill, but a cyclist. He was doing all right too – not moving all that fast, and with a look of absolute concentration on his face, but he seemed to have all of his limbs intact, and he wasn’t on particularly knobbly tyres either.

I still think that, taking everything into account, and given the amount of ruts and black ice around, he’s insane. But maybe, just maybe, if the gritters come around again, and it doesn’t snow too much and it doesn’t freeze too hard again and the sun stays out, I might get back onto the bike. After all, I’ve got some lovely new merino base layers* to play with.

* ‘Oh, you mean a vest,’ as my mum said, when I explained what I wanted for Christmas…

Shouting at the Radio

“And it looks like a return of the wintry weather to parts of Scotland…”

What do you mean return? That would imply it had ever gone away…

“… and with a risk of icy spots on untreated roads”

RISK? A risk? Surely that should be “and with a chance of non-icy spots, I mean if you’re really lucky…”?

(Those aren’t ruts in the road, you’re seeing. They’re ruts in the ice. The road is at the bottom of the ruts)

Minus four is our high today, with snow forecast overnight.  Oh, and the council has (so rumour has it) run out of salt.

We can’t easily walk anywhere, I can’t cycle anywhere, we can barely drive anywhere. Are you getting bored of this yet? I know I am…

Stone the Crows

However long I live here, I’m not sure I’ll get used to going out for a walk in the grounds and coming across a man with a shotgun in one hand, and his small son in the other.

He was out after crows, apparently. I don’t know what crows have done to deserve to be shot, but anyway there were none about. I suppose, given that we have very few magpies up here, there always has to be one avian villain, and the crow was next in line. And I imagine that, being pretty bright, they’d make better quarry than the dim-witted pheasants. There can’t really be any sport in shooting something that hasn’t even got the nous to fly away…