30 November 2010 (Tuesday) - This n That

We’ve had a seriously heavy snowfall overnight (three inches), and as usual the country has ground to a halt.

Normally when it snows I walk to work, but being on a late start (and finish) meant I’d be walking home at 8pm, which is a bit late for that. Also my foot’s still sore, and probably not up to walking the four miles to work. Mind you, my foot’s a lot better than it was, now that I’ve squeezed a pint of pus out of it (yuk!). I’m now wondering (hoping) that my recent problems wasn’t gout at all, but was actually an infection. That would suit me – an infection would just be one of those random occurrences, rather than something which is directly related to my home-brew (which gout would be). If only I had access to a G.P. to find out.

After a morning wasted in NeverWinter I extracted my car from the snow, and set off to work. I spent a little while in the car park taking some photos, and then it was on with the work where I was amazed to find that this time no one had phoned in trying for “snow-leave”.

This winds me up a bit. I blame the schools entirely for this. The schools close down at the mere mention of the word “snow”, and children have come to expect it. We have brought up a generation here in the UK where “snow” is synonymous with “day off”. We’ve had junior members of staff not show up for work in the past. They live five minutes walk from work, but didn’t come in. When challenged why, they honestly believed that half an inch of snow on the lawn meant that the world had shut down for a day.

Normally late shifts at work are dull, but this evening “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” rang for a chat. She was on the Dartford crossing. Having left Lakeside shopping centre at 3pm, her and her chauffeur had only just got to the high point of the bridge. A journey which I’ve driven in five minutes had taken them four and a half hours because of the traffic chaos caused by the snow. We then spent a little bit of time calling up the BBC’s travel pages on the Internet. It didn’t take long to find links to webcams on that bridge, so we could watch and gloat.

And then this evening I found something on-line that made me stop and think. It would seem that my old Boys Brigade Company is no more.

I was in that Boys Brigade for nearly ten years – I was one of the first four of its members to get the Queens Badge. I’ve still got my Queen’s Badge. Although I left the B.B. in 1984, I went back every year to help with the hiking-camping contest, up until the last one in 1990. I was one of the guests at the retirement of the Company’s founder in 1995. Ten people on my Facebook list are from the halcyon days of the B.B. I even met ‘er indoors ^TM  because of the B.B. And once we’d left Hastings we made a point of going back to the church where the B.B. met to get married in. We got both our children christened there, because that church was the home of the B.B.

And now the 8^th Hastings is gone. It’s the end of an era. It’s been replaced by the Friday Friendz (!) How lame is that…?