New Year's Freeze? (From The Argus)

New Year's Freeze?

5:36pm Tuesday 29th December 2009

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By Jo Chipchase - Letting off steam »

As I sit here in the Grandparental Home in the Frozen North (aka Newcastle), I keep eyeing the weather reports with trepidation. I don’t like the predictions that there may be wintry showers on New Year’s Eve. I have a flight booked from Newcastle Airport at 6am Thursday, so I can hop back down to Brighton to party with my friends and shake off the turkey. If my flight is grounded because there’s frost on the wing / freezing fog / snow flurries / slippery ice on the runway, I’ll be stuck in the house with the old folk and nippers (lovely as they are), where more than two glasses of wine is frowned upon, I may be forced to watch a dreadful ‘New Year Live’ TV programme with variety-type performers, and my sequinned black trousers (sale bargain) would be defunct. Plus everyone else will be in bed by half-past-midnight. And that would be something of a shame when seeing in a new decade. Argh!

The forecast has changed in the last day or so and it doesn’t look as if Brighton is going to “get it” again. There may be some rain on Thursday. That’s good news for going out in the spangly pants because everything grinds to a halt when it snows. Where were the gritters during the recent arctic spell when even busy secondary roads in Brighton centre hadn’t seen salt the next day (if at all)? I almost burnt out the clutch on my van when trying to collect some trim to decorate my corset from C&H Fabric (“consider whether your journey is absolutely necessary” – oops) because the van wouldn’t go back up the icy slope at the bottom of Dyke Road. It was sliding on to the opposite side of the road but not going forwards. Some helpful pedestrians had to push it. And then, in Newhaven, the poor van got stuck beside a skip in an icy dip and a knight in shining armour (a kindly commercial vehicle driver) had to rescue me again. Where was the salt? Isn’t there enough of it in the sea, for heaven’s sake?

I have a friend who fell over on the icy pavement just before Christmas and knocked out his teeth (“all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” – hah hah). Apparently, there’s a pending enquiry at Brighton and Hove Council about its handling of the Big Freeze. However, the mishaps can’t be entirely the council’s fault: we Brits tend to be ill-prepared for inclement weather. I can’t help suspecting that some of the people attending A&E departments ventured out on to the skating rink (oops, I mean the pavement) wearing slippery-soled shoes or party footwear before they lost their balance and broke their wrist/ankle/neck. When will people learn? Don’t wear your pumps in the snow! When I drove to Newcastle the night before Christmas Eve, the weather forecast was a tad wrong-ish and I was forced to negotiate 80 miles of blizzard conditions between Leeds and Darlington where you couldn’t see the fast lane, the slow lane or, after a while, any lane at all. Where were the damn gritters? Shall we have a “spot the gritter” contest if it snows on New Year’s Eve? I’ve always thought New Year’s Eve should be renamed ‘Queue Year’s Eve’ because of the queues for taxis / cloakrooms / to get a drink at the bar... but it wouldn’t it be grim as h*ll to spend it in a queue of stationery traffic on a motorway somewhere in the midlands?

Meanwhile, it’s currently 20 degrees and sunny in Malaga. Isn’t that just sickening?