I was away last week at a workshop on nuclear records. This took place in Lancashire, or what I like to call “the south” to annoy Lancastrians, and Margaret came with me to share the driving (public transport in the UK just now not being what you’d call dependable). With perfect timing, this coincided with a sudden and dramatic plunge in temperature to several degrees below freezing. (Despite what the Met Office says, from my detailed knowledge of Disney movies I presume this is because the Queen has lost control of her powers and accidentally created an eternal winter, which only strengthens the argument for Britain being a republic.) It was pretty to look at, all frosted fields and trees covered in snow and ice, but not so much fun to drive in, especially as the cold seemed to push our hire car—a little sensitive at the best of times—into panic attacks.
10 AM on the Moray Firth
Windscreen wiper fluid nozzles can ice over and get jammed, for sure—but after every use? Driving back up the M6 was challenging, as we only had one shot at cleaning the windscreen between motorway service areas. One time I just held the button down in the hopes that something might happen. It did: eventually the passenger-side nozzle freed itself, sending the equivalent of an ice bullet into the windscreen where it exploded rather terrifyingly; meanwhile the other remained jammed, so that the driver-side wiper just smeared the crud across the screen in a hopeless sort of way, like Santa waving goodbye to his reindeer on Boxing Day morning. A lot of the electronics in the car operate by bluetooth, apparently, which works about as well as I do in cold weather. Occasionally we’d get random error messages or the sat-nav would freeze up, so we had to turn the engine off and on again to reboot it. And this was in Lancashire; if I were Captain Kirk I’d be asking some pretty searching questions about the bluetooth capabilities of the Starship Enterprise, travelling as it does through the freezing vacuum of space.
Waiting for the train
Well, we made it back safely, though the last twenty miles were in pitch darkness and heavy snow. Driving up the A99 into a snowstorm and watching the flakes streak towards you is not unlike being in the Enterprise travelling at warp speed while trying to navigate an obstacle course at the same time (hmm: how exactly did Mr Sulu steer that ship?). And so we’re home in Caithness, where the sun barely has the energy to rise above the treetops, and where at this time of year we get just over six hours of what they laughingly call daylight. But there’s only a couple of weeks to go to Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year, and we’re past the solstice when everything will start to change, even if we don’t notice it right away. And if that fails? I’ll just have to go find the Queen in her ice palace; after all, it shouldn’t be too hard: I’ll just have to follow the singing…
Only 7 1/2 hours to go . . .
=========================
TECHNICAL STUFF
I didn’t get a huge amount of knitting done this week, what with being away and all. But I tried not to lose momentum by setting myself a target each day. Each mini-chevron is four rows, or about an hour in all. So I tried to make sure I did four rows a night, even if I didn’t really feel like it, with the result that over seven nights I got nearly three inches done. I’m almost to the point where I can divide for the indented neckline and shoulders, when everything starts to move rather fast, so let’s see what happens this week.
I think Sulu navigated by instruments most of the time. By the time you can see the meteors, it’s too late to dodge.
That windshield wiper sounds like it was refilled with plain water instead of real wiper fluid – it’s supposed to have antifreeze in it. I hope you complained to the hire company, in an icily cold bitter tone of voice.
Hi Tamar, yes, that always amused me – even in First World War naval battles they were firing at enemy ships beyond the horizon they couldn’t see, so the idea that in space they’d have everything “on the view screen” seemed a bit old-fashioned. The battles in sci-fi movies always seem so cramped, given you have the whole of space to play with, and space is, as Douglas Adams famously observed, “really big”.