UK Snow

It is not a journey that I would normally take at five miles an hour, a jogging pace but that is what happened to me on my way home this Wednesday, the first day of any real snow this winter. On an ordinary day my commute might have taken me between fifty minutes and an hour but after three hours I was well and truly stuck on the north bound carriageway of the A1 somewhere between the House of Frazer and Ikea.

The snow had started to fall in the early afternoon.  We watched it through the window at County Hall, watched as the sky grew heavy with a silvery pink light, watched as the lightest of flakes started to drop from the heavens and watched as the view was completely lost in a white veil.  We joked that we would need to get off home soon to avoid a difficult journey and rushed the meeting through to make our escape.

The drive was uneventful at first.  Getting out of Durham was a little slow but this can be a normal occurrence and nothing untoward had happened through Chester le Street and up the bank to the Washington Services. The traffic slowed to a crawl down the Bowes incline but this is to be expected on most evenings and I thought nothing of it until I got to the bottom of the bank at the southern end of the Team Valley and saw the stationery traffic curving away in front of me.  It was then that the wheel fell off or at least it came to a grinding halt.

The following four miles or so took me the best part of two hours, stopping and starting, five or ten metres at a time with not long enough between times to turn off the engine.  I tuned in to the local radio station to get some traffic news and was advised that there were problems due to snow and ice (not very helpful) and that Lobley Hill was closed due to a lorry blocking the road (more helpful).  I inched my way along in the worst traffic jam that I have ever been in on that stretch of road, though not the worst jam I regret to say that I have ever been in.

The radio was my companion and I hopped between channels hoping to glean some news that would help me out of the predicament.  It was with some irony that the newscaster announced that money had been made available in the Chancellors autumn statement to widen the very bit of road that I was stuck on but this was very cold comfort indeed.

Eventually I was able to get off the A1 and work my way over the relatively quiet Scotswood Bridge to re-join the A1 a few miles further on and finally north of the Tyne but it was stop start all the way up the long drag to Kenton Bank Foot.  Another hour had passed by the time I got to the brow of the hill and it was then that I realised the cause of all the delay.

The road that fell away in front of me passed Great Park and towards Gosforth Park was a sheet of ice like an Alpine glacier.  Tyres had no grip and the vehicles were moving by the force of gravity alone.  For the first time that I could remember I was afraid to be driving.  I gripped the wheel, waited my turn until there was a large gap between me and the van in front and edged my way over the lip and down the incline.  It was almost impossible to control the car even at the two or three miles an hour that I managed to hold but eventually, after what seemed to be three lifetimes, I had reached the bottom of the hill and was able to pick up the pace to a more comfortable twenty miles an hour.

I have been along that stretch of road hundreds, thousands of times but I have never seen or been on anything like it.  It was not a patch of black ice but a two mile frozen river polished to a sheen by the cars and lorries on their precarious journeys.  No wonder the road had been backed up.  I was never more glad and relieved to get home and felt thoroughly drained by the tortuous journey.

What happens to this country when there is a fall of snow, it all just seems to go to hell? Apparently there will be more next week and so I am bracing myself for other lengthy commutes.

Today I took the train to work.