Done and dusted, on holiday for Christmas, at least I hope so. In this business you never know when someone doesn't turn up for their shift. It was lovely driving in all that ice and snow.

So where are the Gritters

Alright, so what the hell has happened to the gritters. all this snow and ice on the roads and no gritter in sight. To be fair I saw one in Camberley town centre and one on the A3095 but the later one was just ploughing as there was no grit coming out from behind it. You'd have thought that all the warnings they had would have got them into action and sort out the roads. this is typical, loads of warning of bad weather and bugger all gets done.

Phone goes of at 9am this morning, are you available for work this morning. Not a chance, loads of things to do and it just happens to be snowing like mad out there, none of our roads have been gritted so far and when i was clearing the white stuff from my drive way and talking to my neighbour, he told me that the Bracknell hill had a fair few lorries stuck on it, none could get to the top. Looks bloody marvelous but not if you have to drive on it.

Oh Snowy Day

What a perfect day, 4in of snow in the yard and the snow coming down like buggery. Had to wait till the management came in for a decision to be made. Then I was told to do my run backwards, start in Eastbourne and work your way back to Billingshurst. Now that is a part of the country where the snow just happened to be the thickest. So down the A3, M25 and the M23 I go, the first two were crawl able but when I got to the M23 it just became impossible to drive. Took 2 hours to get to Peas Pottage Services and then the lorry park was inaccessible, parked up on the slip road (like others) and went to ask about the road conditions down to Brighton & Eastbourne.

I was duly informed that the road is seriously snowed under and in no way would I get up the hill to the A27 and of course the down hill stretches would be fun. Called in and was asked to deliver to Horsham, so off I crawled. The roads were horrendous, got stuck on one uphill stretch and a kind soul in a supped up 4x4 helped me out. The customer was closed so after trying to turn a few times I had no choice but to reverse to the roundabout which was about a quarter of a mile back.

Back to the depot at a crawl till I reached the M25, then a huge speed increase to almost 50mph. It will be interesting tomorrow when all this stuff freezes over as I'm supposed to be down there again.

1.) The M23
2.) Peaspottage Services slip Road
3.) The A264

CPC Part 2

Second module of this dreaded 'refresher', was hoping for the Tacho &WTD to refresh my mind but as there were a large number of Council employees who don't use Tachos we had to move on to a different module. Oh well, next time.