cold and dry or warmer and wetter?

Since we are having a proper winter this year, the debate about which sort of inclement weather is preferable is alive and well in the kitchen at work. I have always been something of a fan of warm damp weather, in fact I prefer it to sunny weather in the summer. I love the long drizzly days when the rain is so light,and the temperature so balmy, that it is possible to walk around without actually getting any wetter than is comfortable.

Winter wet though is a different kettle, but with temperatures above freezing I still think it is better than the sort of weather that makes your nose hair tingle with the first deep breath of the morning. (I will make exceptions here for the occasion of skiing holidays)

Wednesday last week was the first day of car ice scraping for a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks in which my preference for water over ice might have been tested somewhat, were it not for the fact that none of my journeys by car were actually interrupted by impromptu rivers, even if the views were dominated by lakeside scenes more than usual. My longer route to work was visited by a half acre of water on one side of the road, at a point usually blessed by a bridge, unfortunately at this time the water levels differed by about a yard from one side of the bridge to the other. Quite a pretty lake, with an unusually large number of trees for a regular lake.

As I stood and scraped on Wednesday, I was reflecting on the mild atrophying of my scraping muscles, and the comparative ease of running, head down, to the car and jumping in, damp. The change from wet to cold occasioned a few slippery patches on the way, including the return of a width of frozen stream across my route, where someone had made an unfortunate dive into the hedge back last January. I turned on to the lane that passes my workplace thinking that it might be a bit tricky and aware of the familiar memories of the sorts of things that had gone wrong on this stretch of road in previous years. I was somewhat relieved that none of my colleagues were meeting me, having been forced to turn round due to accidents, as has happened before. Nearly at work, I arrived at the scene of someone else's accident. They had had the decency to have most of the accident on the verge, although there was an inconveniently parked wreck and a lady standing on the verge appearing to wish to take off as she waved both arms in an attempt to encourage cars from both directions to slow. I concluded, from an eye witness account of the event I heard later, that the problems had begun for this particular driver when she herself had been forced to slow down, on the regular stretch of sheet ice that forms on that particular bend, by an oncoming vehicle.

An early start on Thursday might have made me reconsider my preferences. I drove across a quiet and flat part of the forest, with the full moon hovering over the horizon to the West, as the rising sun slowly filled a pool with molten lava in the East. As the dawn advanced and the moon sank, the thin clouds in the East turned from red to orange and the con-trails lit up like flying rapiers, short, pointed and glowing with metallic reflected light. I suffered a moment of disbelief listening to the local radio traffic report, with the news that cars were finding trouble in the icy conditions and that the A35 Dorchester bypass was slow due to a car spinning on the Puddletown slip-road. This message was delivered completely straight, but I laughed for at least 5 minutes.

Friday made it a hat-trick of window scraping, but with promises of a warmer weekend.

Did Pigs Fly?

The weekend after the first snow in December, after a couple of days carrying a thermos flask in the car and wearing sensible shoes, I took to my bed for the weekend with, largely, exhaustion, but also general muscle and head ache. I had a day off work on the Monday, because, as I told myself, I needed a weekend, after the one I had been through. I discovered quite quickly though, that having enough crud in my lungs to drown in was a good excuse too. On Tuesday, feeling slightly better, I went to work. Now really I was in work because I had a deadline for the Friday, but my symptoms were quite bearable and I was expecting to improve, thinking I was over the worst. Wednesday I felt no better and on Thursday I gave up pretending to work half way through the afternoon and went home again. My intestines had a couple of days off and I was exhausted, hot and headachy; another weekend in bed.

Since then, I have steadily recovered. December was not good for energy, I vegetated the evenings away. It was not really until the Christmas break that I finally got to feel human again. So was it flu? was it even swine flu? I'm reasonably certain I've not had anything that would grant immunity to H1N1 in the past. I know one or two people who've had swine flu diagnosed and that have been very ill with it, particularly with secondary chest infections. I was as ill as I've been in ten years.