It was inevitable. Even Swindon, a town usually immune from the hazards of winter, could not escape the onslaught of our current freeze...

Truth be told we've only had a light snow fall, nothing like the experience of London and the Northeast. Trouble is this snow is the very fine variety that compacts readily and leaves icy conditions the next day. I see council workmen out and about spreading grit. Now that my road is closed for some weeks with a darn great pit in the middle of it, I wonder if the council are going to grit the pavement up the hill? I wouldn't want to have to clear it myself again.

Who Let The Dog Out?

As I opened the back window to take the picture above, I heard two lads having a sort of disagreement. neither could apparently decide who was responsible. For what, I wonder? The answer was Rover, a deliriously happy young rottweiller that bounded up and down the snow laden yard in sheer joy of discovering this fun white stuff that covered his otherwise dull old walkie trail.

The two lads could not get the dog to come back. it ran here, ran there, tail wagging, exulting in the naughtiness and sheer excitement of it all. Meanwhile the two owners still couldn't decide who was to blame for the dog getting out of control and continued their rite of male dominance as they gave up trying to control the dog completely and decided to trudge home again.

A Grim Vision

The other night I had a bad dream. I was looking up into a blue sky and saw an airliner contrail. I noticed a sudden disturbance, as if the aeroplane was flying unsteadily. Then the aircraft, a large one like a jumbo or a 380, entered a flat spin and lost height rapidly. In my dream I watched as the airliner came perilously close to disaster, the airframe nodding lazily as the pilots tried and failed to break the spin and recover the aeroplane to normal controlled flight. My dream turned to horror. It went down into the town below, lost behind the mass of urban buildings, marked only by an expanding black cloud that marked the devastation.

Dreams like that are vivid. They remain in your conciousness long after the usual ramblings of the mind are long forgotten. A part of you wonders if it wasn't some sort of prophecy. I sincerely hope not.

That said, in the last few days an aeroplane has come down. One crash-landed near Swindon with eight people on board. It seems a grim irony that the pilot was airlifted to hospital.

Ooops!

Walking home from West Swindon the other day I passed under the railway bridge. Some years ago engineers fitted bumpers, big girders either side of the bridge in black and yellow chevrons, to ward off tall lorry impacts. It's difficult not to notice it.

There was a large rusty blemish on the bottom edge. Oh? Has someone failed to notice the bumper and drove their vehicle into it? Swindon is notorious for large vehicles colliding with bridges, and so it turned out to be, the errant driver having been fined for carelessness.