winter fun

Haven't done much blogging recently, too busy with ice skating down the river ... It really is a bit weird - after moving here in 1993 we waited 15 years for a proper winter and now we had three in a row (if a proper winter is defined by being able to skate outdoors on natural ice). Of the three cold winters, this was the first one to make the rivers Cherwell and Thames freeze over, and for a full week we were able to skate on a millstream of the river Cherwell.




Oh, and here's George Monbiot explaining why this may well be a symptom of global warming: That snow outside is what global warming looks like.

skating on thin ice

just a few more winter pix while the fun lasts (day 8 of the first proper winter we had here since arrival in 1993).

here's the setting of our local ice rink, also known as the Large Human Collider, or LHC:



Here is phase 2 of the LHC, with two rings joined to a figure of 8. By now there are three rings, with the third joined to the distal ring, going out towards the right hand side:



and here's yours truly, skating on thin ice:




PS Health & Safety advice: this is on a flooded field, so there's no danger whatsoever. It strikes me that the official police advice "keep the children off the ice" is about as sensible as "just say no to drugs". Instead of teaching children what is safe and what isn't, they go for the "don't do anything that may be fun" line and set themselves up for failure.

snow pix

... quickly before the UK's Internet provision collapses under the weight of snow pictures that everybody uploads to facebook and emails to their local media outlets, here are some of my snaps from this morning. I measured 20 cm snow on the top of our dustbin (which of course wasn't collected today, like everything else was shut down as well).






PS This blog service is of course severely disrupted by the extreme weather conditions. Every morning I have to clear the snow off the ice so we can get some ice-skating done. Expecting to resume normal service next week.