Monday, February 02, 2009
My Life in the Snowdrift of Ghosts
So I went to work today. This is partly due to the fact that I didn't realise exactly how much snow had been snowed during the night until I was committed to the whole 'going to work' thing and it was too late to turn around. In previous years, even if there's a good amount of snow making each step an adventure with Mr Compound Fracture by the time we reach the heat sink that is Inner London we've normally reached gondolas and water-wings time. But not today, I emerged with the fear of a white planet, and it was only as I stood on the New Kent Road that I found out all Inner London's buses weren't being allowed out to play today. However, as I was resigning myself on a dispiriting squelch to work a very nice van driver stopped, unprompted and offered me a lift, demanding no payment except his quiet satisfaction at a job well done. Noble knight of the road, I salute thee!
Of course, being the person at our branch that has to travel the furthest to work it was fitting that I was there as all the other members of staff called to say they couldn't make it in. Well, to be fair, it was completely understandable, one had two young children that weren't now going to school and had no bus for her journey to work, one had no overland trains and no two buses to get to work and the last would have come in but was only working for half the day anyway. She was owed time back and I suggested she take it. After finding someone further up the managerial structure than I who had come into work I closed the building I'd barely opened and squelched off to another library to work the day.
With just the three biggest libraries in the Borough open today we had an all hands to the pumps atmosphere, as most of the staff weren't asstupid committed as us there were five members of staff where normally there would be a dozen at least. Needs simplify in this situation, as we are all thinking "Hey, I struggled to get to work today through adverse weather conditions, when are you going to reward that dedication by closing the library and letting me go home?" I also expected the bad weather would drive all the vagrants into our halls to piss on our chairs but hey, no more so than any other day of the year.
Watching TfL anxiously to see if the 'severe delays' on my one route home turned to 'minor delays' or 'hah hah not a fucking chance, why not look in the Yellow Pages for a doss house in which to spend the night?'we were let out at 2:00, at which point the snow had a strange dagger-like texture which ripped at the skin and clogged the eyes making it difficult to see where I was going. But getting home wasn't too traumatic and I'm now burning off the North Sea reserves in an attempt to stay warm. I have a tin of soup for dinner this evening.
Tomorrow? Well, officially I was told I should come to work, unofficially I was told I should come to work, which is the last time I speak to him. Madly I was told "Geroff! I've lost my knees! Garglegarglegargle pomegranates!" and that's advice I intend to always keep close to my heart. Our council has a rather interesting approach to IT, having an intranet which all staff can access but which staff who actually deal with the public, like us, (as opposed to a department like Communications who, as far as I have been able to deduce, don't communicate with the public but exist only to inhibit communication between different council departments and between those departments and the public, this is no joke, they are soulless packets of yak excreta in suits) can't access without going to work. So, when I got to work I saw a posting on the intranet advising that staff who really didn't need to, shouldn't travel in to work today. Which leads me to a fun conversation I'm going to have with my staff next week, how do they suggest they make up the time they didn't work today?
At the moment I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. It's been snowing fairly constantly, at varying consistencies, all day, so there's not been much chance for snow to start thawing, so we shouldn't have extra-slippery pavements tomorrow. But it has been snowing all day, and probably will all night and in to tomorrow. If my tube line decides to give in to the weather then I can't get to work, the overland trains are down and the buses aren't running, bendy-buses can cause more damage as they skid uncontrollably round corners, who knew? But if the tube is still running, do I go into work tomorrow?
Meanwhile, a tube driver explains just why the London Underground always breaks down on the one day of snow each year.
In other news, I went to the Oxford Street branch of Zavvi last week, in order to gloat at how, having changed their name from the fairly sensible 'Virgin Megastore', they were now aground on the shoals of bankruptcy ((c) Eric Idle). Looking for bargains in the sale I reached for Labradford but it was only when I got home that I realised that I'd picked up La Casa Azul. So, with nothing better to do I decided to have a listen today, to decide how revolting it was before seeing if Zavvi are currently doing swapsies on the stuff they are trying to unload. But, much to my surprise, I quite liked it and it's now on my iPod. I have no idea what the songs are about but it sounds like an upbeat bleepy nonsense of a kind that doesn't normally appeal, sort of early Beach Boys steal a bunch of synths and video games and make Spanish pop while Brian eats all the cake. So that saves me a trip.
Mmmm, soup.
Of course, being the person at our branch that has to travel the furthest to work it was fitting that I was there as all the other members of staff called to say they couldn't make it in. Well, to be fair, it was completely understandable, one had two young children that weren't now going to school and had no bus for her journey to work, one had no overland trains and no two buses to get to work and the last would have come in but was only working for half the day anyway. She was owed time back and I suggested she take it. After finding someone further up the managerial structure than I who had come into work I closed the building I'd barely opened and squelched off to another library to work the day.
With just the three biggest libraries in the Borough open today we had an all hands to the pumps atmosphere, as most of the staff weren't as
Watching TfL anxiously to see if the 'severe delays' on my one route home turned to 'minor delays' or 'hah hah not a fucking chance, why not look in the Yellow Pages for a doss house in which to spend the night?'we were let out at 2:00, at which point the snow had a strange dagger-like texture which ripped at the skin and clogged the eyes making it difficult to see where I was going. But getting home wasn't too traumatic and I'm now burning off the North Sea reserves in an attempt to stay warm. I have a tin of soup for dinner this evening.
Tomorrow? Well, officially I was told I should come to work, unofficially I was told I should come to work, which is the last time I speak to him. Madly I was told "Geroff! I've lost my knees! Garglegarglegargle pomegranates!" and that's advice I intend to always keep close to my heart. Our council has a rather interesting approach to IT, having an intranet which all staff can access but which staff who actually deal with the public, like us, (as opposed to a department like Communications who, as far as I have been able to deduce, don't communicate with the public but exist only to inhibit communication between different council departments and between those departments and the public, this is no joke, they are soulless packets of yak excreta in suits) can't access without going to work. So, when I got to work I saw a posting on the intranet advising that staff who really didn't need to, shouldn't travel in to work today. Which leads me to a fun conversation I'm going to have with my staff next week, how do they suggest they make up the time they didn't work today?
At the moment I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. It's been snowing fairly constantly, at varying consistencies, all day, so there's not been much chance for snow to start thawing, so we shouldn't have extra-slippery pavements tomorrow. But it has been snowing all day, and probably will all night and in to tomorrow. If my tube line decides to give in to the weather then I can't get to work, the overland trains are down and the buses aren't running, bendy-buses can cause more damage as they skid uncontrollably round corners, who knew? But if the tube is still running, do I go into work tomorrow?
Meanwhile, a tube driver explains just why the London Underground always breaks down on the one day of snow each year.
In other news, I went to the Oxford Street branch of Zavvi last week, in order to gloat at how, having changed their name from the fairly sensible 'Virgin Megastore', they were now aground on the shoals of bankruptcy ((c) Eric Idle). Looking for bargains in the sale I reached for Labradford but it was only when I got home that I realised that I'd picked up La Casa Azul. So, with nothing better to do I decided to have a listen today, to decide how revolting it was before seeing if Zavvi are currently doing swapsies on the stuff they are trying to unload. But, much to my surprise, I quite liked it and it's now on my iPod. I have no idea what the songs are about but it sounds like an upbeat bleepy nonsense of a kind that doesn't normally appeal, sort of early Beach Boys steal a bunch of synths and video games and make Spanish pop while Brian eats all the cake. So that saves me a trip.
Mmmm, soup.
Labels: libraries, personal history, snow, weather
Saturday, January 05, 2008
I was depressed this morning because I currently leave for work before sunrise and typically arrive back at home after sunset. Unfortunately I found this website that tells me I've got a good month or so to go before I'm at least travelling to work in daylight, even if it's another couple of months before I'm returning home before the sun goes down. Maybe I do need to move closer to my place of work...
Labels: weather
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
Ahhh, this is more like it, it's a bank holiday and it's bucketing with rain, and apparently will be continuing to do so all week.
Labels: weather
Thursday, February 08, 2007
I really don't like snow and ice that much. I tend to like water in it's varied forms (hey, it's certainly the cutest sixty percent of my body mass) but I'm not too keen on it when it's solid because if there's one thing I like more than water it's notfreezingmyfuckingarseoff and the presence of snow tends to point towards the buttock-clenchingly chilly. After that "Squeeeeee! Snow!" moment you get on waking in the morning and looking out the window it's a vale of fucking tears my friend and let no-one tell you any different.
It's partly the fact that the United Kingdom is so shit at dealing with snow. All essential services grind to a halt as though the white stuff were some foreign concept. "'Snow' you say? Never heard of it. Sounds like some beastly trick of the European Union to make us abandon the pound. God save the Queen!" In fact, Londoner's learnt to live with the Blitz and Irish bombs so you would have thought we could have learnt to adapt to the snow. But no, first the train network breaks down because, being only a mere century or so old, they haven't had the time yet to R&D something to deal with the problem of snow on the line.
Roads generally don't have the same problems they did in the past. These days metropolitan areas have snow ploughs and gritters. In villages like the one where my parents live and I grew up (it's a fairly suburban village, it is surrounded by farms but the farmers are related only by marriage, not by birth as well) you are taking more chances when you go out driving. For many years we did have a big yellow bin at our end of the village on which was written 'SALT' but then we also had teenagers, so now when we have snow it's like Winter in Narnia. We did have Anne Widdicombe as our local MP but she never rode around on a sleigh or offered kids sweets.
Then there is the ritual of listening to local radio in the hopes it will be announced that your school was shut. This rarely happened to me as most of my schools were on main roads and I suspect the snow ploughs and gritters were in the pay of the headmaster. So instead we had the ritual of the mass snowball fights on the school fields. First break was always the best time as we ran out in to that snow that was as pure and virginal as the first form boys who would soon be covered in most of it. Mine was a school of traditions: prefects, the Combined Cadet Force and PE Teachers with drink problems and the belief that kids were given to them to help ease the frustrations of their unhappy marriages (Hel-lo Mr Diamond if you're out there!) and the tradition of the snow was that on the field race didn't matter, religion was unimportant, your father's conviction for embezzlement was forgotten, you were a band of brothers (I went to a single sex school, does it show?) with everyone in your year and your aim was simple: To find how fast snow had to travel to pierce the skin of someone younger than you. Once that was ascertained the next ritual was to sit shivering through lessons for the rest of the day because your clothes were all wetter than if they'd been put in the washing machine. You know that film Final Destination where the kids don't die in the plane crash and Death comes after them because he's pissed off with being cheated? We had buses with bad breaks and hills that tended not to be gritted. I cheated Death enough times going to school that I got invited to his sister's wedding and met his parents.
When you go out to work it's still the same. Will your business open and, if it does, will you get to go home early? For some reason, probably related to the way they automatically close for Christmas fortnight, most council departments decide not to bother opening when the white stuff is one the ground but libraries are expected to keep going regardless, as though people think they half-remember some old report about how the reading brain generates enough power to heat a small flat. We were due to stay open until 8:00 pm and had to wait until after lunch for the important decision from the management about whether we would shut and go home early. And it's one of those classic double binds, on the one hand we might get to finish early and go home, but on the other hand the library is better heated than my flat. Seeing as the management will go home early anyway it's never easy to guess how much they will care about the plight of their staff but in this case they let us close early. So I came home and had a warm bath.
I've wandered away from my point, whatever it was. Something to do with the sucking of snow and ice. But really, snow isn't that bad I suppose, it's when it melts and refreezes, that's the unpleasant time. I'm not looking forward to tomorrow, when the one mile gentle slope between my house and my place of work is transformed into a fiendish death-trap. I tend to end up having to take my chances walking in the road rather than on the sheet-ice pavements. Never mind these shoes for kids with wheels in the heels so as to allow the child to bend backwards, fall over and hilariously crack their skull on something sharp, the person who invents a successful shoe with a furnace underneath to allow us to burn holes in ice and so be guaranteed firm footing in snow will make a fortune.
Roll on the summer, I've already prepared my essay complaining about excessive heat and how ice cubes melt so quickly.
It's partly the fact that the United Kingdom is so shit at dealing with snow. All essential services grind to a halt as though the white stuff were some foreign concept. "'Snow' you say? Never heard of it. Sounds like some beastly trick of the European Union to make us abandon the pound. God save the Queen!" In fact, Londoner's learnt to live with the Blitz and Irish bombs so you would have thought we could have learnt to adapt to the snow. But no, first the train network breaks down because, being only a mere century or so old, they haven't had the time yet to R&D something to deal with the problem of snow on the line.
Roads generally don't have the same problems they did in the past. These days metropolitan areas have snow ploughs and gritters. In villages like the one where my parents live and I grew up (it's a fairly suburban village, it is surrounded by farms but the farmers are related only by marriage, not by birth as well) you are taking more chances when you go out driving. For many years we did have a big yellow bin at our end of the village on which was written 'SALT' but then we also had teenagers, so now when we have snow it's like Winter in Narnia. We did have Anne Widdicombe as our local MP but she never rode around on a sleigh or offered kids sweets.
Then there is the ritual of listening to local radio in the hopes it will be announced that your school was shut. This rarely happened to me as most of my schools were on main roads and I suspect the snow ploughs and gritters were in the pay of the headmaster. So instead we had the ritual of the mass snowball fights on the school fields. First break was always the best time as we ran out in to that snow that was as pure and virginal as the first form boys who would soon be covered in most of it. Mine was a school of traditions: prefects, the Combined Cadet Force and PE Teachers with drink problems and the belief that kids were given to them to help ease the frustrations of their unhappy marriages (Hel-lo Mr Diamond if you're out there!) and the tradition of the snow was that on the field race didn't matter, religion was unimportant, your father's conviction for embezzlement was forgotten, you were a band of brothers (I went to a single sex school, does it show?) with everyone in your year and your aim was simple: To find how fast snow had to travel to pierce the skin of someone younger than you. Once that was ascertained the next ritual was to sit shivering through lessons for the rest of the day because your clothes were all wetter than if they'd been put in the washing machine. You know that film Final Destination where the kids don't die in the plane crash and Death comes after them because he's pissed off with being cheated? We had buses with bad breaks and hills that tended not to be gritted. I cheated Death enough times going to school that I got invited to his sister's wedding and met his parents.
When you go out to work it's still the same. Will your business open and, if it does, will you get to go home early? For some reason, probably related to the way they automatically close for Christmas fortnight, most council departments decide not to bother opening when the white stuff is one the ground but libraries are expected to keep going regardless, as though people think they half-remember some old report about how the reading brain generates enough power to heat a small flat. We were due to stay open until 8:00 pm and had to wait until after lunch for the important decision from the management about whether we would shut and go home early. And it's one of those classic double binds, on the one hand we might get to finish early and go home, but on the other hand the library is better heated than my flat. Seeing as the management will go home early anyway it's never easy to guess how much they will care about the plight of their staff but in this case they let us close early. So I came home and had a warm bath.
I've wandered away from my point, whatever it was. Something to do with the sucking of snow and ice. But really, snow isn't that bad I suppose, it's when it melts and refreezes, that's the unpleasant time. I'm not looking forward to tomorrow, when the one mile gentle slope between my house and my place of work is transformed into a fiendish death-trap. I tend to end up having to take my chances walking in the road rather than on the sheet-ice pavements. Never mind these shoes for kids with wheels in the heels so as to allow the child to bend backwards, fall over and hilariously crack their skull on something sharp, the person who invents a successful shoe with a furnace underneath to allow us to burn holes in ice and so be guaranteed firm footing in snow will make a fortune.
Roll on the summer, I've already prepared my essay complaining about excessive heat and how ice cubes melt so quickly.
Labels: personal history, school, snow, weather
Hmmm, it's snowing a fair bit here. If we're lucky we may get the evening off work. It's nice to work in freshly fallen snow. It's less nice when it's started to melt and refrozen as ice...
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
It's a depressing morning for news... The Anglicans join the Catholics in defending their right to prejudice over possible gay adoptions, it's nice to know that queers can enable the various wings of Christendom come together (though it's all that Cherie Blair's fault), it's supervillain team-up week in Tehran as North Korea is supposedly helping Iran develop nuclear weapons, there's a good article in the Guardian from Zoe Williams on the return of the idea of female chastity while the Daily Mail prefers to ask why can't we go back to the days when we blamed women for everything, as though we'd left them behind. And Shrubya tries to find things to feel good about in the United States. And then I look out the window...
(though of course, this means the tube trains will be messed up because with only over a century of operating experience they won't be prepared for what to do in cold weather...)
(though of course, this means the tube trains will be messed up because with only over a century of operating experience they won't be prepared for what to do in cold weather...)
Labels: adoption, Christianity, gay, gay adoption, George 'Shrubya' Bush, Iran, lesbian, North Korea, snow, United States, weather, women
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Oy! Who turned Summer off? I know I was whingeing about the heat but I wanted you to turn it down , not switch it right round to Winter. Bloody global warming, if it's not melting bits off of you it's freezing them instead.
Labels: weather
