What's the worst.......

Early '63, we were driving home to Linlithgow after a wedding in St Andrews - in a blizzard. The wipers on my father's car failed. He had to keep stopping to clear the snow. Don't know how we made it home.

janerowena - lucky you didn't become hypothermic. We might never have known you.

Freezing fog is the scariest weather you can get on the Fens. Blizzards are just as bad. You can't see the sides of the roads but you know the ditches and dykes are there somewhere. A Fen blow in spring, which is just like a black sandstorm, is pretty unpleasant as well.

These are just a few of the reasons I nearly divorced DH when he brought me here in 1975. We're still here......

The wind is so bad today our thick privet hedge which protects the front of the cottage is almost flat to the ground and the dogs are shaking just like they do in a thunderstorm.

Winter '62/'63 in Sussex, the sea froze and icicles from the gutters nearly to the ground made the house look like a prison from within - but of course the schools stayed open so we didn't have to stay in!

Is it still a porsche jane ?? !!

Being stuck on the snow-bound M25 30-odd years ago, in an elderly unheated porsche with skinny tyres and virtually no heating, in a snow blizzard in an evening dress after a dinner, and knowing I would freeze to death if I parked up like everyone else. All the cars parked up in the slow lane, nose in to the side, just like a car park. You couldn't see signs or know where you were, everything looked so different. I thought I would stop just for a bit and have a rest after the blinding snow that had kept us crawling at about 5mph for hours. I had a nap and woke shivering at about 4am to see a snow plough slowly making its way along the motorway. I followed in its tracks, after managing to get over the mounds it made, and luckily not only was there a pretty full moon, but I recognised my turn off by the shape of the hills just before it. I still had another hour after that, but at least there was a little heat while I kept going and the fear and exhilaration of it all still stays in my memory.

Now we have better weather forecasts, better heating in cars, and mobile phones. And I am older and wiser and keep a rug in the car.

I remember lumps of ice in the sea, and huge snow drifts in '63

I also remember driving at night in fog so thick you couldn't even see the tail lights of the car in front even though there was a steady slow line of traffic. I had the children with me, they were only toddlers at the time. Very scary.
This was on the way home I add, I wouldn't have left the house in that !

GA I subsequently got to know the locality very well when I was a Census Officer in 1981 and had to count the houses (really!) in the villages between West Walton and King John's Bank to see which had increased and which had decreased in the previous ten years. I knew every road in the Marshlands!

anno that's the road I described above. I'd been visiting clients on an isolated farm road.

GA, I remember driving from Terrington St Clement down to King's Lynn in a ferocious blizzard. No hedges to protect the roads from the horizontal snow and white lines obliterated. I think it was pure guesswork that got me home. In the winter of 62-63 I was travelling daily into Edinburgh to do a Dip Ed. Head-high drifts everywhere and the local loch frozen over for six weeks. Quite pretty, but sooooo cold! Trains never stopped running to time on the main Glasgow-Edinburgh line.

Winter '62 - '63 in Teesdale. Could have had snowball fights for 6 months. I was 13 at the time so remember it as a bit of an adventure. We had drifts 14' high at the farm gate but amazingly were never actually snowed in and managed to get to town (to school) every day ! Can't see that happening now - 2" of snow and we grind to a halt.
My parents said 1947 was worse. They had to dig themselves out of the house and into the byres to get to the cattle. It must have been very hard work.

I wouldn't fancy your Force 12 feetlebaum !!

Force 12 off Cape Hatteras...