So I got the shovel and the grit and from 8 to 10 I was shoveling my drive and trying to get the grit on the corner of our road (not, as my wife pointed out, scraping off the car).  After I put the grit on and went off to church (a very low attendance) my neighbour took over and far faster spread far more grit in a far shorter time.  While he was about it he cleared my drive, this time properly as apparantly I don’t have a clue (he’s right).  The result is that now the corner is not an ice rink, as it has been for two years, but a rather unattractive brown slush.  It would have been better if we’d gritted it last night, but it’s far better than the ice rink.

The great thing was the amount of people who were talking to each other as we were out with our shovels clearing our driveways.  Most of Belstead Avenue now has a precarious footpath cleared around it.  All this (apart from the grit) has been going on probably since Belstead Avenue was built in the 1930s, but amidst all my moaning about how this or that is not done properly, we do still have the ability to pull together.

If your street does not have the gritter visiting it, then get in touch with me about the grit bins.  We can’t rely on the greenhouse effect to clear our roads.  Unless we’re the Met Office.

The worst thing about the global warming scare is not the bad predictions, after all the weather and climate are different and Britain will always have a hard to predict weather pattern.  And there is a widespread scientific conviction that there is warming due to human activity, so taking pot shots at the science is fun but it does make the warming-pragmatists look madder than the warming-true-believers, which is precisely the reverse of reality.

The real problem is that we are going to see a massive spike in heating costs, something that won’t affect most Labour or Tory MPs and will only marginally affect the sort of people who become constituency party chairmen or councillors (particularly in the almost exclusively public sector middle class Labour Party).  It is, however, going to lead to the needless death of pensioners.  It’s also going to lead to a slowing in economic growth, and so a stunting of living standards among the most vulnerable.

Like the BT fiasco at Suffolk County Council the worst policy mistakes are when there is a cross party consensus, particularly when there are interest groups in the mix, not when there is a jolly party knock about.

Please email me on james@bridgeward.org.uk so that I can help you through the process.

The gritting routes have now been published.  To find them follow these instructions.

1.  Go here:

http://suffolk.elgin.gov.uk/index.cfm?fuseaction=streetworks.streetworksMap&layers=streetworks

2.  Go to the “Zoom To” box

3.  Choose Postcode

4.  Enter your full postcode

5.  On the left hand side scroll down until you get the Highway Network folder and then choose the salting routes box

If you are on a purple route you are priority 1 and you’ll have your road (not pavement) gritted reasonably frequently.  If you’re on a green route you’ll be gritted quite infrequently, but still gritted.  If you have no route (like I do) then there will be no gritting.  None.

It seems that there was a phenomenally poor prediction and calculation of the rock salt needed. While I could get out Hayek and talk about how this failure is bound to happen, why not look at something less controversial, how rubbish the Met Office proved to be?

They are continually erring on the warm side of any medium term predictions and while this is merely annoying when they predict a “barbecue summer”, people are dying because of their poor predictions this month.  Piers Corbyn, left of Labour activist and brother of ultra left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, says that he has predicted the cold snap with far greater accuracy far in advance.

His contention is that the Met Office didn’t just believe in global warming, they really, really believed it and were prepared to predict on the basis of it.  And that’s why people are dying on the roads and we don’t know whether we’ll have to ration gas through the cold snap.

This is not to say that global warming is nonsense.  As the BBC and the government (or did I repeat myself?) have been telling us for the last week the weather is not the same as the climate.  A pity the Met Office seems to have forgotten.

(Just to cheer you all up, Piers Corbyn reckons that the cold snap will prove more than a snap and despite a couple of warm spells go well into February.)

Like many people who live in Bridge I was held up in the drama today.  For once I’m not going to moan about the railway company, who did the best they could under extraordinary circumstances – and if a chimney being struck by lightening is not extraordinary then I don’t what is.  In the end we were held up for one and a half hours – although the flow of information was constant and reassuring, and the staff pulled together. 

Ipswich station was also well run considering that it had been evacuated just twenty minutes before we got there, with even delay-repay forms being handed to us as we got out of the station.  It is a stark contrast to the times when much smaller incidents seem to have given the railway a nervous breakdown.

Anyway here are the stories from the BBC and the Evening Star.

Any way here are a couple of photos that have appeared on the BBC and in the Evening Star, if anyones got other pictures, particularly in Bridge, let me know on james@bridgeward.org.uk