Icingcakeesque

I've just noticed that the last comment over in the box to the left there is one from me, looking forward to a 'chilly scooter ride over to Manchester's fashionable Westside come January 4th'.  Nothing of the sort happened because both the scooter and myself had fallen foul of the Big Freeze.  So the first working day of the New Year saw me shivering indoors under every available blanket,  while the scooter stood equally forlorn in the back yard, its battery as flat as the icingcakeesque four foot covering of virgin snow that had transformed Levenshulme, and indeed the whole of Britain, into a Victorian Christmas Card Scene.

The scooter has refused to move since, and indeed if I have interpreted correctly the hideous death-rattle that emanated from its poor frozen insides when I attempted a kickstart, it is unlikely to consider a commute to the fashionable Westside, or indeed anywhere else, until the temperature in Levenshulme approaches that of somewhere properly fashionable and a little more European.  Palermo, perhaps, or Valencia.  I don't blame it in the slightest and am only prevented from adopting a similar stance myself by the suspicion that the munificence of the Human Resources Department at  Statutory Agency X does not extend to the granting of extra paid leave to employees who have been caused by the Big Freeze to develop a Latin Temperament.

All of which meant that early last Tuesday morning I was to be found in an unworldy icescape that on closer inspection turned out to be Piccadilly Gardens.  A number 203 bus, its destination plate reading rather optimistically 'Glossop', inched its way out of the concourse, outpaced by businesslike types in heavy-duty North Face kagouls, who were busy making ominous pronouncements into the mobile phones clasped to their ears.

'Wythenshawe?  Wythenshawe is a complete no-no, don't even try it'

'I've just had Paul on the line.  He's been stuck on his drive since five this morning. We're going to have to cancel Eccles'.

Forty minutes later a slow Liverpool train, running exactly to schedule as if in rebuke to those fancydan upstarts the icebound Metrolink trams, dropped me off outside my offices in the Westside.  Only three other people had made it in, and just as we had exhausted our nightmare commute-across-the-city-in-the-snow stories we were joined by the manager, brandishing in the style of Clement Attlee an extraordinary communique from Head Office granting us the afternoon off 'on account of the unprecedented conditions'.  By three o'clock I was back at home.

And what with the continuation of the Big Freeze and the cross-county school closures that was about as much work as I did all last week, and I even got to spend Thursday wandering around a deserted Science Museum with Frankie, inspecting the insides of steam trains and surreptitiously eating our own packed lunch in the overpriced, overmanned cafe.  All of which would expain why today, having put in a full day's work with not one but two meetings and approximately several emails, some of them concerning actual matters of statutory vitality, I'm absolutely knackered and need to go off to bed for an early night, and hope that the Big Freeze continues to thaw into unsightly sludge.  With which warming thought I bid you all Happy New Year, and Good-Night.