Weather chaos on the roads. A traveller's tale.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.  I was  caught on the 'white hell' of the M74 yesterday.  And great fun it was too.  People got out of their cars and helped each other, grinning inanely.   A local farmer trundled around offering tows.  Heaving men pushed vehicles out of ditches. Lanarkshire has never looked more wonderful. 

   
  It blocked at Abingdon where two lorries had got stuck doing what lorries do - which is occupy as many lanes as possible.  I reversed to let one of them back up, and got stuck myself.  Eventually the gritter man came and sucked his teeth. This was a serious man and he wasn't going to be hurried. But after a few more heaves and several shovel fulls of the hard stuff we were off again. Tragedy avoided by prompt and decisive action.


   So, you see - men aren't completely redundant after all.  We may be increasingly superfluous in reproduction, and positively dysfunctional in the new feminised work place. But we're always going to need a few of us still around for days like this.  Man days.  When it snows.  Keep a few of us around in glass cases to be broken open when the weather changes.



  Back on the M74 the road was clear but very snowy.  The north bound carriageway looked like Kosovo during the Balkan war.  But there seemed to be no one going south at all.  I wondered if the road had been closed further north, and kept on going through virgin snow. It was very peaceful.  What a rare privilege - driving noiselessly down an empty motorway.  We should do this every year.