Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Image: Little ol’ me

When I got up yesterday the look outside was just as it had been all weekend: hard snow that was disappearing inch by tiny inch. By the time I left for work, large snowflakes were stuck to my window as a fresh blanket of snow began to descend across Edinburgh and the rest of country. It didn’t stop for a long, long time.

By lunchtime several inches had fallen, and throughout the morning (mostly through Twitter) news filtered through first of train cancellations, then the Forth Road Bridge and then a few roads around Edinburgh. Within an hour, all buses had been withdrawn by all companies, trains were cancelled or severely disrupted and the company I work for realised it had to send people home but couldn’t because the roads were deserted of all forms of transport.

It was a new hell.

Twitter has been a lifeline throughout all of this. It has allowed me to keep up to date with all the latest news from the travel companies as well as helping me forward road information to my friends and family who were either out in the car or in my sister’s case, trying to get back from Belgium (Glasgow and Edinburgh airports closed early on in the day).

God knows how much snow has fallen this past week but it’s been a lot. We wouldn’t expect to see any kind of snow until late January and February, but November and into December? Unreal, man!

In other news, while I cannot stand Pete Docherty in any way, shape of form, I have to applaud the project that is underway to knacker the X-Factor’s hijacking of the Christmas Number 1 slot. Last year I was only to happy to purchase the single by Rage Against the Machine and was thrilled to see they ousted the faceless, talentless drones that the X-Factor churns out year upon year.

This year we have a recreation of composer John Cage’s experimental work 4’33”, the sound of an orchestra NOT playing. That’s right, a track of total silence all in protest (dubbed Cage Against the Machine and which currently has 60,000 Facebook fans) against the negativity of X-Factor and the terrible effect Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh have had on the British music industry.

Orbital, Imogen Heap and Pete Doherty, Billy Bragg, Coldcut, John McClure, The Kooks, Heaven 17 and The Big Pink are among those who will do nothing in a recording studio in London in order to highlight the negative effect of X-Factor and shows like it, as well as help to raise money for five charities. It sits at 5/1 to be Christmas number one, which is still a relative outsider compared with the eventual X Factor winner, who is 4/7 favourite.

Even better than this, however, is James naughtie’s balls up on live radio when he mispronounced Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s surname. It’s Hunt, Jamesy, not c*nt! Although some would possibly disagree.

I’ve rediscovered the joy of reading in the bath. The coldness outside has led me to take long soaks in the bath these past few evenings, and I picked up another book to add to the two I’m already reading while doing so. FRY: A MEMOIR by Stephen Fry, only just came out in hardback but won the autobiographical award at the recent British Book Awards. I love Stephen Fry. He’s funny, intelligent, witty and a charming bloke, his attempts at fiction and poetry in the past delightful and this, the sequel to an earlier memoir of his early years, MOAB IS MY WASHPOT, is just as I hoped it would be: fascinating, funny and smart.

Until the morra peeps!

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