Dark Moods on White Roads
The sky had brooded all afternoon and finally the clouds burst as rush hour was about to commence. But the weather was in a black humour and went dramatically sideways not long after we had had crammed onto our respective buses. It was a cold evening; I leapt onto the bus in the middle of a downpour and leapt off in the middle of a snowstorm. Ye gods.
My umbrella was hopeless; this stuff was being blown horizontally. Fat, glistening snowflakes tore across the suburban skies, catching the sodium streetlights as they fell to create beautiful fountains of sparkling orange light. But there is very little poetry in having to grit the pavements and scraping ice off the car windscreen. For adults, snow is something to be appreciated from afar and certainly not when travel is involved.
I turned on the television and found pictures of blizzard-swept Derbyshire on the news. I was surprised...normally, the rest of the country can be under six foot of snow, but the news will only take notice once the first snowflake hits London. Then chaos breaks out, and a hundred hysterical news features are launched to an uncaring nation like balls from an old cannon... Coronation Street will be dropped to be replaced by a two hour special on the history of snow, the newspapers will print nothing but pictures of Londoners ditching their cars, running around in circles and shouting "aiiee!", whilst the weather forecast will feature a tired and emotional Rob McElwee punching Michael Burke in the teeth and screaming for the end of the world.
By this morning the snow had turned ugly; after dumping their white load on Thursday evening, the clouds melted away to leave a freezing cold night, turning the snow to ice and promising a bollock-squeezingly awful commute for we happy workers. The traffic reports were grim…I set off for work across the ice with a heavy heart, losing my balance somewhere in the region of every four seconds. In my mind all I could hear was a manic sound effect from some old cartoon that ended with an almighty and painful drum crash.
So I was astonished to see that not only were the roads clear of ice; they were also remarkably traffic free. It was the fastest commute for months, and I was baffled. But what the hell. I am due some commuting karma after a week of suffering…bad weather, late buses and abysmal traffic has put me in a foul temper every other night this week. By Wednesday I was considering breaking into the headquarters of the First bus company and tearing the managing director limb from limb. I would have then put his head on a spike and paraded around Sheffield, to a barrage of whoops and cheers from a city full of pissed off passengers.
That feeling is gone now. The air is now crisp and the sky is blue. Perhaps tonight I will be cursing and bellowing and making twisted torture plans, but for now the world seems all right. Just don't snow again until I finish this job next week, y'hear?
My umbrella was hopeless; this stuff was being blown horizontally. Fat, glistening snowflakes tore across the suburban skies, catching the sodium streetlights as they fell to create beautiful fountains of sparkling orange light. But there is very little poetry in having to grit the pavements and scraping ice off the car windscreen. For adults, snow is something to be appreciated from afar and certainly not when travel is involved.
I turned on the television and found pictures of blizzard-swept Derbyshire on the news. I was surprised...normally, the rest of the country can be under six foot of snow, but the news will only take notice once the first snowflake hits London. Then chaos breaks out, and a hundred hysterical news features are launched to an uncaring nation like balls from an old cannon... Coronation Street will be dropped to be replaced by a two hour special on the history of snow, the newspapers will print nothing but pictures of Londoners ditching their cars, running around in circles and shouting "aiiee!", whilst the weather forecast will feature a tired and emotional Rob McElwee punching Michael Burke in the teeth and screaming for the end of the world.
By this morning the snow had turned ugly; after dumping their white load on Thursday evening, the clouds melted away to leave a freezing cold night, turning the snow to ice and promising a bollock-squeezingly awful commute for we happy workers. The traffic reports were grim…I set off for work across the ice with a heavy heart, losing my balance somewhere in the region of every four seconds. In my mind all I could hear was a manic sound effect from some old cartoon that ended with an almighty and painful drum crash.
So I was astonished to see that not only were the roads clear of ice; they were also remarkably traffic free. It was the fastest commute for months, and I was baffled. But what the hell. I am due some commuting karma after a week of suffering…bad weather, late buses and abysmal traffic has put me in a foul temper every other night this week. By Wednesday I was considering breaking into the headquarters of the First bus company and tearing the managing director limb from limb. I would have then put his head on a spike and paraded around Sheffield, to a barrage of whoops and cheers from a city full of pissed off passengers.
That feeling is gone now. The air is now crisp and the sky is blue. Perhaps tonight I will be cursing and bellowing and making twisted torture plans, but for now the world seems all right. Just don't snow again until I finish this job next week, y'hear?
posted by Jamie at 11:04 AM
2 Comments:
An excellent post! I too was caught up in the very same blizzard, slithering and sliding my way home via Crookes.
And now the weather is (kind of) warm again. When the snow fell last week, a few people started muttering that the predictions were correct, that winter was going to be a horrible, frozen and protracted affair...but these people forget where these predictions came from.
It was some bloke. Reported at length by many papers and TV news programmes. This bloke predicted last year that the summer of 2004 was going to be damp, as it turned out to be.
In the old days, there was a saying that an expert is defined as someone who makes three correct guesses in a row. Now it appears you only have to make one.
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