We had our delivery of oil the other day, well I say the other day it was about 2 weeks ago now... and we've had a belter of a cold snap with temperatures hitting record lows around the country.... needless to say our boiler has been on quite a bit...and that has just about kept us from freezing.... I was more than a bit shocked when testing to see how much oil we had consumed when I pulled out the sight valve to see the oil level drop by half IN TWO WEEKS !!!
At this rate we will need a refill at the end of the month and oil prices have sky rocketed so that will be a welcome bill right about Christmas time...NOT !! All we can hope is that this nasty cold snap will pass and our boiler can ramp down from its current ravenous consumption of heating oil....
The only other notable event was my near death experience at 3am in the morning on the way back from dropping Andrea off at the station so she could attend a running event in Birmingham... So after waving her off at the station, I made my way back on the A40, I got about half way down the road when it just poured down with rain, at first I thought "brilliant!! it will melt all this ice and snow" but that thought soon melted away when I glanced down at the temperature readout on our car and it stated quite categorically that it was minus 6 degrees centigrade....
It was right about that moment that I noticed the back end of the car starting to drift gently, I quickly realised that I was driving at 55 - 60mph on black ice, and not just a "bit" of black ice either... the whole road was a sheet of black ice...I could see it freezing as I drove..... The temptation to slam on the brakes was so overpowering but I knew if I did then I would eventually come to an abrupt halt but probably against a tree or crash barrier and in a completely uncontrolled fashion....
If you could have traced my path down the dual carriageway it would have looked like a gentle diminishing sine wave....weaving from side to side .....unbelievably or maybe by pure chance I also managed to get it around a bend in the road before my speed reduced naturally to a more sedate speed, not helped by the low friction road surface ...
My only comfort was another car on the other carriageway suffering the same terror.... we were separated by the crash barrier so no chance of impact with each other and all I could see in the fleeting glimpse I had of the other driver was that he had an equally ashen white face and the very same look of abject terror written all over his face as he weaved past me jinking gently in the mist and rain with his hazard lights flashing...
I did think it's a bit late for that mate I've been skating for the past mile...I eventually got home driving at a sedate 20mph..... phew !!!
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