A little snow had began to fall....

[Dave Plowman (News)]

If it was an auto select neutral if you need to stop on ice, etc. And brake very gently. The amount of creep on an auto upsets the brake balance at very low speeds on ice.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It was approx 10 inches in this part of London. I was out with the dog early and the common looked magical - with barely a foot print. Later on that day it was covered in snowmen including some superb ones - more like sculptures. Obviously the right kind of snow for such things. A few igloos too.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Same here - no rubbish collection yet - should have been Tuesday. No recyclables collection either. Interestingly the 'traffic wardens' also seem to have been given time off

- they drive round here on scooters, and given how most of them drive (on L-plates too) I'd have looked for some fatalities. ;-)

[Mark]

In my area the bin men also man the gritting lorries. So if they're gritting there's no collections.

[Invisible Man]

I must say our MX5 was surprisingly well behaved when I had to drive 20 plus miles on snow and ice in north Norfolk last year. Wife not impressed when I depressed the throttle just slightly at one point and the back went well sideways.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Last of the manuals mate. 5 speed and LSD at the back..I loved it and hated it as well.

[Dave Liquorice]

Our bin day was yesterday, but with the kids on the second "snow day" I forgot until I saw the truck turning into the top of the road. Monday nothing came in, no post and no deliveries to the Co-op. No bread or milk in the afternoon. Alston Moor was effectively cut off from mid Monday morning through to Tuesday morning. They got a single track width cut through the 8 to 9' drifts on Hartside by late Tuesday afternoon. Killhope is 4WD only, B6277 to Middleton-in-Teesdale still closed. Hexham and Brampton roads are clear.

[Rod]

Always used to be the case (when council employees), but I thought it had gone away from that with contracting out?

But still no information. The county/district mob did at least tell the local paper (albeit the report was gibberish as published). Ah! Found something very general and non-specific on the news section.

[Bob Eager]

So what's the solution? Parents should check before packing them off to school, or is that too hard? (actually, it probably is for some of them)

[dennis]

However if its a Smart don't bother.. not only are they short and rear wheel drive but the auto box is awful. If you put it in manual select the stupid thing will still change gear just when you don't want it to. Why bother with a manual select if you are going to ignore it anyway? The more I drive the Smart the more I hate it.

[dennis]

in Tipton!

[Dave Baker]

noticed recently that if I click on some links in Usenet (not all of them) I just get an "invalid syntax error" message after IE fires up. However if I then copy and paste the link into IE it works fine. This happened on the link above. It's only a recent issue and it doesn't affect all links so it must be something that's changed on my system even though I haven't changed anything I can think of that might cause this.

Any bright ideas?

[Dave Liquorice]

Our boys(*) do a very good job. The clear road was ploughed and gritted every hour from about 1800 on Monday through to 0000 about the time the snow stopped falling and had become a bit wet so had stopped drifting as well. It was also ploughed and gritted again about 0800. In the evening you'd be hard pushed tell it had been round only an hour before.

The slushy one was last treated in the afternoon of Monday. It's still closed past the last house. All the main roads are now open, until later tonight/tommorow?

(*) There are two gritters with blade and point ploughs and a snow blower at a yard in the town all year. They don't do a lot from May to September but in the other 7 months of the year the gritters can be out gritting against frost.

[Mike Clarke]

I doubt if any schools could cope with a few hundred parents trying to phone in for information just before starting time.

There's no easy solution but I do feel that the schools are over reacting to fears about litigation and health and safety policies. I'd expect a fair number of pupils as well as staff would fail to turn up. The staff to pupil ratio would probably still be less than the desired ratio but the school could still provide a better environment for kids where both parents are out at work all day.

[PeterC]

I had to walk about 3 - 4 miles to school to take my 11-plus. Turned up a bit late, was told I couldn't take it, said I'd walked and was then OK.

This was Cornwall in '58 - first snow for 11 years, so the kids didn't know what snowballs were; my brother and I soon showed them!

[dennis]

There have been several injuries and at least one death as a result of kids

*not* being at school. I think it would be safe to say a school is a safer environment than most other places even when its snowing. The authorities should take this into account before putting the kids at risk.

[The Natural Philosopher]

There IS an easy solution.

Make Joe citizen RESPONSIBLE for using his *own* judgement.

Not Joe public servant responsible for failing to warn him of a possible issue.

These days, faced with possible litigation under a huge plethora of Elfin Safety rules, the interpretation of which will keep the average shoal of lawyers busy for years, its easier to 'just say no'

It's PERFECTLY possible that a school could have a web site, where people could look, and someone designated to say on it e.g. 'school busses are looking dodgy: don't rely on them, and the playground will be closed today due to ice, but otherwise we are open for business'

The ONLY problem is that people are educated from the cradle to seek advice on how to run their lives, not on how to take control of them and make practical common sense decisions.

How on earth our cat ever manages to have kittens without 17 'cat' scans, a course in prenatal behaviour, and a manual on how to breast feed and the psychological implications of kitten hood, beats me...

I do remember opening the door two days ago, and another cat looking out, sniffing, and deciding it wasn't REALLY that interested after all..

I remember in 62/63, that on one occasion, I turned up at the station, and after a couple of hours with no trains, simply went home.

On another, two or three teachers didn't show, so we either had empty periods, or were reassigned.

And games were cancelled. Or took place in the gym, instead.

[Jules]

Here closures/late starts are always put up on the school's website, the school district website, as a scrolling message on the local TV weather channel, and every ten minutes or so on several local radio stations.

If one school in the district calls a closure or late start, they all do, just so there's no confusion or risk of some teachers not making it in.

I think we've had five or six late starts so far this season, but all due to the extreme cold rather than the snow. One of those was due to a power failure at the school bus depot - no 'leccy meant no engine block pre-heaters, which meant none of the buses would start :-)

cheers

Jules

[Jules]

Fond memories of a sledding hill somewhere around Leamington Spa, too - there was a fence at the bottom and a pond beyond. So of course the goal became one of getting up enough speed to duck under the barbed wire fence (without decaptitation), and then end up right on top of the frozen pond beyond :-)

Bah! In this part of the world we've got lots of lakes, and the ice on them stays thick enough to drive a 4x4 on for several months of the year. I'm trying to work out if I can homebrew a hovercraft and legally register it for use, as that'd be a heck of a lot of fun :-)

cheers

J.

[Clint Sharp]

In message , "dennis@home" writes

All 'semi auto' boxes do this.

It's a tie in with the washing powder conglomerates I tell you. Scared me half to death in an Audi a few years ago, belting towards a roundabout expecting to be able to use the gears to slow down.