This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 23/03/13
And Deeper Still
All right, this is getting a bit eerie now.
Having started snowing on Thursday evening, it continued without pause right through Friday and into the night. I stood at the window of my library (*) sometime after midnight and saw that all the parked cars had been turned into ice-cream moulds, and that there were foot-or-more-long icicles hanging from the sodium street lights.
When I finally dragged myself from my pit shortly before noon, it was still coming down. Remember this picture from yesterday?
Well, this is how it looked about twenty-four hours later:
This, I might add, is instead of what I shovelled away from there yesterday. Note also the ice stalagmite on the right - clear evidence of a hideous wind chill.
I put the central heating on, of course (and I've been on pins throughout all this, expecting the power to go off at any time), but then heard an ominous gurgling. You see, the condensation outlet pipe goes down and out through the wall and into a plastic pipe on the back wall of the house, this emptying into the same drain as the sink. In persistently cold weather, said plastic pipe has an unfortunate tendency to ice up and block, which in turn backs up into the boiler. Hence the gurgling.
There was nothing for it, then, but to turn the heating off again, boil a kettle of water and go out to pour it over the pipe.
Far easier said than done, because that now involved trying to get to the bloody pipe in the first place, buried as it was under about two feet of drift. There was no alternative but to dig my way down to it. A further complication arose from the fact that my shovel was in the shed (I'd got rid of the snowbank against the door by using the dustpan).
All I could do, then, was to get my coat, gloves and balaclava on, somehow tug on my Doc Martens (bought for me after the 1979 event I referred to yesterday) and wade (this being emphatically the mot juste) out to the shed.
By the time I had covered the eight or nine feet to the shed door, I was wet up almost to my knees. Pulling open the door - with some difficulty because the snow had drifted up against that, too - I extricated the shovel and set to work.
It must have taken me about twenty minutes to finally expose the pipe, and the thought occurred to me that I might have been doing more harm than good, in that at least the snow might have insulated the pipe from the further effects of the wind chill. I had no choice, however, and once the pipe had been uncovered I went back into the kitchen to get the kettle. I poured the hot water over the pipe (the pipe itself didn't seem to be blocked - I could tell because it isn't sealed into the outlet on the wall, so I could pull it out and look down it - so I concentrated my fire, or rather my steam, on the outlet itself). Satisfied that I had done all that I could, I stumbled back into the house and turned the heating back on. Gurgling now minimal. Job - it appeared - done. I then had to get my boots back off and go and change into a dry pair of trousers and socks.
It's now 15:00 and it is still snowing, albeit fairly lightly at the moment. The forecasts suggest that it will keep on like this well into Sunday, in which case - our dear Council obviously concentrating on making sure that its middle-class customers in Marford and Rossett are still able to go shopping in Chester - I might not even be able to get into work on Monday; Arriva have tweeted that their Wrexham depot is under a foot of snow, most of their drivers have been unable to get in, and so no services will be running in the whole area for a second day.
I think that the comparison I made yesterday is no longer apt: I would have to go back over forty years - way back into my primary school days - for the last time that I can remember having this much snow in one continuous burst.
I'm waiting for some media clown to start going on about how this 'proves' that AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is a myth expounded by fanatical commie killjoys intent on destroying Profit and the Civilisation which follows inexorably in its wake in pursuit of their puritanical ideology. Lawson? Delingpole? Monckton? Over to you, boys... 
(* A grandiose name for the smallest bedroom where I keep nearly all my books.)
