Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Fed up with the lack of water, we decided to relocate ourselves from my place to Alice's house down by the river where the electrics might be in an uncertain state but at least we wouldn't have to keep melting snow to flush the loo.

Walking through town, we found the main roads still closed but there were quite a lot of people wandering around on foot. Much to our good fortune, Marks and Spenser in town was open, enabling us to stock up. Possibly unsurprisingly, there was no great shortage of stock; rather, the staff were going through, frantically stickering perishable items that were clearly about to hit there sell-by dates. As a result, we picked up a lot of stuff — including a big pile of sandwiches for lunch for the next few days and a number of meal-deals — for almost nothing.

Arriving at the riverside, we found the house in a good state, with relatively little disruption from the re-wiring work. The damage to the plaster seems to have been limited to a series of discrete holes — mostly around lightswitches and plugs — with most things working as expected. C&J joined us, both of them having been in to work as normal, and we got the fire going and had a really lovely evening enjoying the intermittantly falling snow...

Waking up to a light dusting of snow this morning, I immediately took a photo of it and dashed in to the bedroom to show it to A, who'd been lamenting Exeter's lack of snow for quite some time. We were both excited by it, but my reaction was somewhat dampened when I noticed that, once again, our water pressure was low, suggesting that the building inlet had frozen. We had a slightly leisurely breakfast watching the snow coming down in swirls and I went in to the office where I discovered only DJM was in and was about to leave before conditions became too severe.

During the morning, there were a series of announcements about the impending snowpocalypse and the closing times for the various eateries at work were updated. I had a meeting with a colleague, rescheduled from the day before, and ate lunch early before returning to my desk. At around 1320Z, we were all asked to leave and told not to come in tomorrow. I took a few photos, caught the last bus into town, and took a few more pictures of Exeter in the snow. By this point, the blizzard had started in earnest and id din't really let up until the end of the day.

Arriving home, I was greeted by a curiously lovely smell in the hallway. It was stronger in the flat and, when I went through into the kitchen, I realised what it was: A had baked a lemon drizzle cake! Sadly we were still without water — A had had a number of conversations with the neighbour from the basement — but we had some big bottles of water from Tuesday and we put on some big saucepans of snow to flush the loo.

After tea and cake, we went for a walk in Belmont Park, where the entire community had turned out to enjoy the snow. We were particularly impressed by an enterprising group of students who were attempting to sledge using a large ABS suitcase — we felt they'd've been more successful had they opened it up and used the two halves together rather than leaving it closed. We walked back the long way round and went round by the dry ski slope — very much covered in snow — and put down footsteps in the pristine snow.

It seems that Exeter has been hit by heavy snow. In some places it's apparently knee deep. Something I discovered early than most when one of my colleagues phoned to see whether I was going to be in the office today, obviously not having realised that I'm in Coventry...

Not much snow when I got up, but things suddenly switched over to blizzard conditions while I was on my way to the bus stop. After a couple of hours of on and off showers, we ended up with a couple of inches, most of which went when the clouds finally cleared.

According to the forecasts the West Country is due to have more snow tonight which, combined with ice overnight, means that tomorrow's weather doesn't exactly look promising. Lets just hope I make it back to Coventry as planned.

After trudging down to the bus station in this morning's blizzard, I've discovered that none of the services are running and probably won't be until this afternoon. So it looks like I'm going to be working from home, this morning at least...

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ETA: Out buying lunch in town, I saw a scene reminiscent of John Masefield: a group of choristers in brilliant red robes walking across a snowy cathedral green, apparently intent on making snowballs.

I also saw a car ploughed into a house on the junction between Belmont and Clifton roads. I presume the driver must have taken the corner too fast and slide sideways on the ice into the bay windows at the front of the house with enough force to crack the stucco and, by the looks of things, damage the brickwork. Not good.