According to the BBC.
Last night was the coldest I can remember. It was -11°C at 9 am today, and it had dipped to -12°C in the night. That's following three consecutive nights at -9°C. This is Pembrokeshire, for God's sake - Gulf Stream, stuck out in the Atlantic, maritime climate and all that. It's unheard-of. The bedroom was 8°C.
The BBC Weather page predicted a -3°C minimum at 10 pm last night. Good to see they can get it almost right six hours in advance. That will make their predictions for 2100 pretty reliable, then.
Right - off to Newgale with the dogs. Have a good day.
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Saturday, 25 December 2010
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Deep. And crisp, even ...
Yesterday, the weather finally caught up with the BBC Weather Service and did what it was supposed to do. Snow.
It started yesterday afternoon with a bit of cold rain, which gradually turned into sleet, and then started falling more slowly and visibly white. By nightfall, we had a nice covering of crisp flakes all over the drive. This morning, the world was eerily quiet, which is one of my favourite memories of snow as a child. I lived in the frozen North (County Durham) and we had snow every winter. One day, the sky would darken and you could smell the approaching snow. That night, you went to bed in anticipation of something special.
If you were lucky, when you woke up there were two signs that snow had arrived. One was the strange quietness, as the newly-fallen snow muffled any noises, and the other was the odd lighting effect in the bedroom - the ceiling was brighter than normal, as the majority of light entering the room was coming from below, reflected from the snow in the garden. If it was the weekend, it meant wellies on and a trip to the park with the toboggan. If it was a schoolday, it meant - school. I don't remember school ever being closed because of the weather. I suppose it helped that I was within easy walking distance of about half a mile - a distance that most parents today would consider to be justification for a 4x4 purchase and a row at the school gates over unsafe parking.
I can remember the winter of 1963 very well. I'm not old enough to remember 1947, but 63 was pretty epic. In fact, I can remember feeling fed up with snow by the time it ended, which says something. I was 9 in January 1963, and I can clearly remember walking up the road to school with the snow almost waist-deep. It had a hard crust on the top - although not hard enough to walk on - so that each step was an acrobatic lift of the leg to waist height, then a move forward and a plunge through the crust to the firm ground below. Getting to school took for ever that winter. The school playground was on a slope, so the first thing we did was to polish up a decent slide down the middle, and spend the time before lessons sliding sideways from the top of the playground to the bottom. The bell went for assembly, and while we were inside the caretaker would come out and put salt on it. It was "for our own good". Health and Safety didn't start with the 1974 Act. (To be fair, he always salted the slide after we had gone inside. These days, there would be a 'procedure' whereby the slide would be salted before anyone arrived and a full auditable record kept, to ensure that no-one had any fun at all.)
I'm rambling. Again. This is what it looked like half an hour ago:
View from the front door.
The lane to the main road.
View across the valley behind the house.
And not to forget the bikes:
A very frozen Pan, and
A cold and soggy XT. Bless 'em. I'll bring them in for some hot soup later.
It started yesterday afternoon with a bit of cold rain, which gradually turned into sleet, and then started falling more slowly and visibly white. By nightfall, we had a nice covering of crisp flakes all over the drive. This morning, the world was eerily quiet, which is one of my favourite memories of snow as a child. I lived in the frozen North (County Durham) and we had snow every winter. One day, the sky would darken and you could smell the approaching snow. That night, you went to bed in anticipation of something special.
If you were lucky, when you woke up there were two signs that snow had arrived. One was the strange quietness, as the newly-fallen snow muffled any noises, and the other was the odd lighting effect in the bedroom - the ceiling was brighter than normal, as the majority of light entering the room was coming from below, reflected from the snow in the garden. If it was the weekend, it meant wellies on and a trip to the park with the toboggan. If it was a schoolday, it meant - school. I don't remember school ever being closed because of the weather. I suppose it helped that I was within easy walking distance of about half a mile - a distance that most parents today would consider to be justification for a 4x4 purchase and a row at the school gates over unsafe parking.
I can remember the winter of 1963 very well. I'm not old enough to remember 1947, but 63 was pretty epic. In fact, I can remember feeling fed up with snow by the time it ended, which says something. I was 9 in January 1963, and I can clearly remember walking up the road to school with the snow almost waist-deep. It had a hard crust on the top - although not hard enough to walk on - so that each step was an acrobatic lift of the leg to waist height, then a move forward and a plunge through the crust to the firm ground below. Getting to school took for ever that winter. The school playground was on a slope, so the first thing we did was to polish up a decent slide down the middle, and spend the time before lessons sliding sideways from the top of the playground to the bottom. The bell went for assembly, and while we were inside the caretaker would come out and put salt on it. It was "for our own good". Health and Safety didn't start with the 1974 Act. (To be fair, he always salted the slide after we had gone inside. These days, there would be a 'procedure' whereby the slide would be salted before anyone arrived and a full auditable record kept, to ensure that no-one had any fun at all.)
I'm rambling. Again. This is what it looked like half an hour ago:
View from the front door.
The lane to the main road.
View across the valley behind the house.
And not to forget the bikes:
A very frozen Pan, and
A cold and soggy XT. Bless 'em. I'll bring them in for some hot soup later.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Friday 13th survived once again
Wow, what a ride home last night! To start with, torrential rain, which had wet the inside of my visor when I was walking to the bike from my office. Not in itself a problem, I might add, but then there were gusty winds up to, acording to the BBC, 85 mph. The Honda is the worst bike I have ever had for reacting to side-winds (it's all that weather-cheating plastic), so that made the ride a little more entertaining. Then, of course, it was dark, and so visibility was a real problem. I ride home along the A40, which is busy at that time of night with commuters and ferry traffic, and I was facing a constant stream of headlights. Normally, the visor will clear of raindrops if you can get up to a decent speed. Self-cleaning seems to happen at about 55-60 mph, but there was no hope of achieving that last night. So I was wiping the visor constantly, but to no avail, because the worst of the water drops were on the inside. Every approaching light was refracted into a hundred small points of light across my area of vision, which gave me no chance to adapt my eyes to see the detail of the darker bits. And, of course, the dark bits are where the hazards lie.
After all the rain of the afternoon, the road was covered in water, and in places the puddles spread from the verges to meet in the middle - and this is the A40, remember, the main road into West Wales. I tried to travel in the centre of the road to avoid plunging into deep water, but that put me directly in line with the bow-waves thrown up by vehicles travelling the other way. It was almost comic, like having buckets of water thrown over you. There was so much spray being thrown up by the car tyres that all cars were invisible below the window-line.
It was, you might say, conducive to concentration. In fact, I would say that it was the worst conditions I have ever ridden in. Colleagues can't believe that a sane human being (or even me) would want to ride a bike in weather like this. I was constantly fending off comments all day:
Bet you're not on the bike today, har har.
But of course.
Mad.
Yup.
OK, it was a bit of a challenge, but then physical challenges are quite rare these days, what will all the safety rules and the we-must-eliminate-all-risk lobby. I admit it, I enjoyed it.
And, of course, if I had gone to work in the Mundaneo, I wouldn't be writing this.
After all the rain of the afternoon, the road was covered in water, and in places the puddles spread from the verges to meet in the middle - and this is the A40, remember, the main road into West Wales. I tried to travel in the centre of the road to avoid plunging into deep water, but that put me directly in line with the bow-waves thrown up by vehicles travelling the other way. It was almost comic, like having buckets of water thrown over you. There was so much spray being thrown up by the car tyres that all cars were invisible below the window-line.
It was, you might say, conducive to concentration. In fact, I would say that it was the worst conditions I have ever ridden in. Colleagues can't believe that a sane human being (or even me) would want to ride a bike in weather like this. I was constantly fending off comments all day:
Bet you're not on the bike today, har har.
But of course.
Mad.
Yup.
OK, it was a bit of a challenge, but then physical challenges are quite rare these days, what will all the safety rules and the we-must-eliminate-all-risk lobby. I admit it, I enjoyed it.
And, of course, if I had gone to work in the Mundaneo, I wouldn't be writing this.
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