Cornish Pasty Blog

A solitary lesson in winter driving

It's a fine Autumn day, blue sky and sunshine all the way, simply beautiful. It's cold outside, bitterly so and at 6pm quite dark.

Weather like this can lure one into a false sense of security, I won't break down on a fine day like this. It follows that if I didn't breakdown, I didn't need extra stuff in the boot, hats, gloves, fleece, etc.

I didn't break down but I did get turned off the main road partway home and took to a narrow country lane to get around it. I wasn't the only one. Everything went swimmingly, for 10 minutes or so, until I met the people heading in the opposite direction who had the same idea. The lane was narrow and, apart from a couple of gateways, there were no passing places. A general consensus was that there was going to be at least an hour, maybe two, of waiting while one stream of cars reversed back. I shut off my engine and began to wait. It didn't take long to get to the point where I felt the chill. As luck would have it I had a fleece in the back of the car and even a pair of gloves.

I didn't want to put the radio on and run any risks with flattening a battery; OK a car radio shouldn't flatten a radio anytime soon, but, knowing my luck, it would be then that I would discover that I had a borderline faulty battery. No problem there, I got out my Axim and keyboard and composed a few emails and listened to some podcasts. Eventually things began moving and some 20+ cars reversed the mile to a t-junction. Apart from the need to keep the car stocked for any occasion where the engine isn't running, especially when it's cold or wet outside, one thing I learnt was don't head back down to the main road at the first opportunity, you will still meet others coming from that direction. I lost another 20 minutes heading back to the main road, when I should have headed further into the country at the t-junction. Ah well, all was well in the end, I got home warm and not very late; crickey, there are -people who have a far greater commute than the approximate hour or so each way.