janewilliams20

[Error: unknown template qotd]It's very simple as far as I'm concerned: to get to work, I have to drive. If I can drive to work safely, I do. If I can't, I don't. Driving a car requires faster reflexes than operating a mouse.

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I wonder why this thing labelled "writer's block" has appeared on my LJ home, and what it does? Good idea, anyway.

Winter when I grew up. It takes a while for the memories to come back, and warm up: wrong phrase there, in this context. It was cold. Not bitterly, feet-of-snow level cold, but cold. We didn't have central heating, and the fanheaters in our bedrooms were expensive to run, so getting out of bed was a shock and involved dressing rapidly (getting partly dressed under the blankets could be done). Or if feeling extravagant and lazy, slide a toe out to the heater switch....

There wasn't usually much snow, but frost on the pavements, yes, or enough slush and ice to make walking either difficult or interesting depending on your viewpoint. Deliberately sliding down gentle slopes made them even more slippery, which was fun, but got you into trouble if caught at it by people who had the other viewpoint on these things. If it was a music day at school, I was carrying a cello nearly as big as I was, and if the wind caught me on the route to the bus-stop, I could slide quite a way even on the flat using that as a sail.

We lit the fire in the dining room in the autumn, and from then on it stayed lit till the spring: you banked it up at night by lifting a piece at the front up with a special lever, and did the same during the day when everyone was out at school or work. First one home in the evening lowered that, raked it out, and put fresh coal on. And that was the central room of the house, where we had the radio on and did our homework, because it was warm.

If the weather was particularly bad, the buses couldn't get up (or down) some of the hills, so buses from the centre of Luton couldn't get up to us on the outskirts, and also couldn't cope with one of the hills on the way out to Hitchin - the Offley hill, on the old road. I remember one morning the driver starting off from the Offley bus stop, pausing at the top of the hill, and calling back to the conductress: "did they say how we're meant to get down this? Forwards, or sideways?" We got down forwards, but very slowly. Not being able to get to school would be a problem, but not being able to get home would be worse. Ten miles, Letchworth to Luton, is a long walk. If it had ever come to it, I expect they'd have put us up with the boarders for the night, but it never did.

The only time I remember really deep snow may be exaggerated by memory anyway. I was very small, so small that "the baby" was left at home while my dad took me out on a sledge after dark. "The baby" - Helen must have been about eight months old, and I'd have been three. We went all round the local streets, and over to Putteridge Bury where there was a slope steep enough to ride down without needing to be pushed. A wonderful, magical, night. There was never snow as good as that again, probably because in later years, I was seeing it with more critical eyes. We built snowmen, we had snowball fights, we lost mittens and froze our fingers, but while it was fun, it wasn't the same magic as that first time.