Normally I am at work of course, so I didn’t know how many people to expect for a weekday daytime session, but I thought that we had a decent crowd – nine people in Broadfield.  Maybe it is always that good, or maybe the weather encouraged everyone to come out.  Or maybe the recent encouraging opinion polls have whipped up the enthusiasm of members.

On the minus side, I think the weather also encouraged all the residents to go out as well because hardly anybody was in, but it was a nice 90-minute walk if nothing else.

I guess the problems and reasons for lack of capability to deal with rain are similar to our inability to cope with a bit of snow.  If it only happens for a couple of days a year, can you justify the capital investment in infrastructure to deal with it?

Ideally we sould stop getting snow, but I would settle for it blocking our road after thursdays instead of before thursdays for a change.  Visitors round here commented on how big our snow drifts were – but really it was just piles of bin bags with a layer of snow on top.

In Crawley:

And in Washington:

I’m so glad we have our police…

I came home and saw somebody in a Land Rover (or similar) at the bottom of Hollingbourne Crescent give up.  His vehicle was diagonally parked, nose in to the kerb and he got out and pushed the back end in sideways, which is impressive in its own way.

Chrystal had to go to her school to pick up some work and when she got back she told me that Tollgate Hill is officially closed now – there is a proper ‘road closed’ sign at one end and a van parked at the other end with flashing lights and everything. I haven’t gone out to see for myself; I am, after all, working here, trying to compare and reconcile four different documents with each other.

None of this happened last week when we had less than half the depth of snow so maybe it is the ‘wrong kind’ after all.

Looks like my rubbish won’t get collected for the second week running.  It is piling up a bit because we are now throwing out stuff that would have been recycled normally – but that hasn’t been collected for 7 weeks now.  The borough council are doing their best – they have provided a local place where you can take your rubbish between 8am and 2pm which is handy if you don’t have a normal job and live close enough to the site to carry the bin bags there.  Unfortunately the only person I can think of who fitns that description is my local councillor. It is no use to me at all.

It is not just me having nothing to say or write about apart from the weather though.   One of the RSS feeds I follow is the Horsham local paper. This is what the feed currently looks like:

1. Snow: school closures Friday – updated
2. Real-life man of snow
3. Snow: school closures Friday
4. Snow: care workers pull out all the stops – audio
5. Snow: county council extra workers drafted in – audio
6. Fallen tree blocks Cowfold road
7. Horsham (Aus) 40 degrees; Horsham (UK) -4 degrees
8. Snow: 1,000 999 calls in 24 hours
9. Snow: Thursday – ice creates major problems; schools closed
10. Horsham recycling and rubbish collections suspended [because of the snow]
11. Snow: county warning to drivers
12. Snow: school closures for Thursday – update
13. Snow: police report no major incidents
14. Snow: Warnham hit by power failure
15. Snow: advice for safer driving
16. Snow: audio – county has enough grit
17. Snow: latest disruption
18. SNOW: pictures of obstacles
19. Snow: more snow at weekend
20. Snow: delays and cancellations to transport
21. Send us your snow photos
22. Snow: schools shut across county
23. Snow: traffic chaos in Horsham district
24. Snow: schools gear up for closures
25. Snow: Gatwick Airport runway closed Tuesday night
26. Snow hits Horsham
27. Snow: police warn motorists
28. County council prepares for the snow
29. Snow: latest Met Office forecast

That’s right – of the last 29 entries, going back to Jan 5th, 28 relate to the weather – unless the Cowfold Road tree fell because of the weight of snow, in which case nothing at all has happened in the whole of Horsham that is not related to the weather!

Ironically, the printed version is due out tomorrow morning and I will probably be unable to get it at my local shops… because of show disrupting the deliveries.

Number 28 amused me.  My first thought was that they must have prepared by panic-buying bread, bog rolls and tinned food for their homes, because the state of the roads in Broadfield doesn’t provide much evidence of anything more practical than that.

The story itself says that “gritters will be working round the clock as part of the effort to keep major A and B road routes open” so presumably Tollgate Hill is not a major B road route, despite being the route lorries use to deliver food to Morrisons and Iceland at the Barton.

It also says that they were “preparing to distribute salt in hippo bags to around 100 key locations for hand spreading.  These will mainly be shopping precincts and hilly areas“.  Obviously, and despite the clue in the name, the Tollgate Hill area is not hilly and our local shopping precinct is not a shopping precinct.   That is a pity because delivering these hippo bags sounds like a really good idea and full marks to WSCC for coming up with it.

Maybe the overall picture for the county is as rosy as it is painted but, yet again, the north of the county is very much the poor relation, and within that area Broadfield seems to get the lowest priority. I am reminded of that line from The Commitments where Jimmy says:

The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

We should adapt that for Broadfield!

Nothing fast about Fastway this morning

Sometimes even I am astonished by my naivety.  Perhaps misplaced optimism is a better alternative.

After last night’s walk I knew there would be no buses up Tollgate Hill (no problem as I don’t want them anyway) but I just sort of presumed the more level roads would be better anyway and that the main roads between local shopping parades and the town centre had more chance of having been treated – so I walked the mile up and down hills to the Fastway stop and discovered just how wrong I was.Having got that far I decided it would be easier to walk the remaining four miles to work than to come back up the hill.   I also thought I should make the effort just in case our VIP visitor did manage to make the journey in the afternoon.

By lunchtime we saw some No. 10 buses go past our offices, but they only had town centre as a destination.  By mid-afternoon it was confirmed the VIP visit was off so I came home and found that the No. 10 was going as far as the Broadfield stadium, which helped a lot – I’m still not happy though.

I am giving the optimism a rest for now.  I have decided to not even bother putting out my bins or my four weeks’ recycling tonight.

The iconic Crawley crows feeling the cold

Farnham Close at midnight

Everything looks so clean and white outside so I don’t want to complain about the weather, but I think I may moan a bit about the timing of it.  It is only about 8 or 10 centimetres here at the moment.  Hardly Arctic conditions, though it has made our street impossible again.  This time our car is stranded on Tollgate Hill so I’ll get the bus into work in the morning – a minor inconvenience but not the end of the world.

There is a bus route that runs past the end of our street.  I won’t be using that because it doesn’t go wher I want to go – I will walk the mile to the shops to get a Fastway.  probably just as well.  I went for a walk at midnight and Tollgate Hill had not been gritted at all and looked pretty much snowed in.  Not sure if buses will be on that route tomorrow.   We are always told our steep road will never get gritted because priority goes to the main roads and bus routes – I wonder what the excuse is for not doing Tollgate Hill this time round?

What is really depressing is that this is sure to mean our rubbish will not get collected on Thursday.  Our recycling has not been collected for four weeks and if it gets missed this week we might have to wait another two weeks.  The recycling bin filled up ages ago and we have now got fed up of having tins and paper piling up indoors so we are going to stop recycling until the council start collecting it.

All that is just nuisance though.  The real problem for me is work.  We have a VIP visitor coming down from London and the various communications departments have spent all week setting up product displays in the atrium of our building – we even have an aircraft in there!   I don’t know what the main train line and the A23/M23 is like  but it is now looking likely the visit will have to be cancelled.

If only the snow had held off for a day everything would have been fine.

Unusually for me, I have a big pile of work in my bag: more than enough to keep me busy for a day at home, but I can’t take that easy option just in case our visitor can make it after all.  Mind you, if that happens I may find myself being the only one there to greet them…  so many of my colleagues come in from the coast, or from Surrey.

Tollgate Hill at midnight. Lots of abandoned cars - even more than last time.

We saw the picture of the plane, nose down in the snow, and were more than a little concerned.  Was anyone hurt? we wondered.  There is no sound on the TV feed on these screens, but Jim saw the banner text going across it and passed on the news “all passengers were removed safely”.  While we were all breathing a sigh of relief he followed up with “but they’ll want their pound back!” and hilarity ensued.

I guess you had to be there, but it really tickeld me.

Our car (foreground) in its new location.

Our car has not moved from where it was abandoned parked on Friday – halfway down our road, pointing uphill.

Actually that is only half-true.  The truth is even worse, and a little more embarrassing.  I did move it on Saturday morning.  I got it far enough uphill to turn around, then I went off to the shops.  When I came back it got stuck just a bit further up from where it had been parked and could get no further: all I could do was let it roll/slide back to exactly where I started.Saturday night we had a party to go to, and thought it might be worth trying again but the thing would not even budge an inch – just a lot of wheel-spinning on the ice.  So we just went back home. Our neighbour reckons it is because of the way the treads go on our tyres, but there is no way I am going to go and swap them round in this weather.

Today there was a lot of activity in the road.  Some blokes from right at the top had come down with shovels and hacked away the worst of the ice in the road at the bottom so they could get their cars and vans up to the top, and others had been spreading grit.  I thought it might be worth trying to move my car after all that so I went back down hill, spent ten minutes scraping the windows, and then had exactly the same result as before.  I reckon we could make it up the hill OK if only we could get the car out of its parking space: all that grit and shovel work was only in the middle of the road and not right in front of our wheels.

Earlier on I had taken a walk to the shops and see that there are still a lot of people in the roads off Tollgate Hill leaving their cars at the bottom of both ends of Hollingbourne Crescent just to be sure.  It makes some sense, although it also makes the entrances to Hollingbourne a little more hazardous than they would otherwise be.

I didn’t go as far as Hobbs Road (Crawley’s steepest road – my arse!).  I imagine it is bad, but no worse than Hollingbourne Crescent, Hammond Road, Ranmore Close or Wye Close.  The county council boasts that it has loads of grit – enough to last the winter – so it is frustrating they can’t spare any for those few roads that really need it.   It is fortunate that nobody up here needed an ambulance or fire engine over the weekend!

Anyway…  a few photos from my walk:

The northern entrance to Hollingbourne Crescent

The southern entrance to Hollingbourne Crescent

A closer look at the south end of Hollingbourne Crescent

I’ll be taking the bus to work tomorrow…   What is even more frustrating is that Chrystal’s little Daewoo seems to have to trouble getting up the hill.  Must have the right kind of tyres or something.