There is always a first time . . .

Following on from yesterday’s weather related post, one of the team, for the first time in their professional lifetime, failed to get their Ferrari out of their manor house’s drive and into work due to snow. There is a huge sense of failing in not being able to get in but the conditions were not the best for rear wheel drive vehicles and most people on the manorial estate that all GPs reside in were in the same boat. More people on foot than usual and all saying the same thing we set off for work and then stopped and hadn’t moved since.

At 06.00hrs was there only yesterday's thin covering of snow by 08.00hrs there was 4 inches. A snowplough got out at lunchtime but the track it cleared and the grit it spread is now covered over by fresh snow. We are stuck and it is still snowing.

The telephone lines have been most entertaining as they are several feet lower than normal and every now and again one of them will start bouncing up and down for no apparent reason before a white, snake like, curved line of snow plummets downwards. The line has broken one thinks as one watches the snow fall down creating a curved indentation in the untouched newly fallen snow?

It looks like it has as one looks at where the line was but then if one looks a foot or two higher one sees the telephone cable is still intact. The schools are closed, the buses cancelled, blood collections normally collected by taxi are being yomped to local hospitals. Those of the ND Central team who could get into work went in 4X4s, on foot or as best they could. Some of us, for the first time ever, could not.

Praise be to the Party for it is always prepared for everything. We are surprised that no-one senior has been wheeled out to tell us how we are the best prepared country in the world for flu, sorry we meant, snow.

Must have been the “wrong” kind of snow? And the ice man cometh tonight . . .