Walking Amongst Dark Shadows » british weather

An Entire Country Frozen (almost) Part 2

Darren/Kain — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:07:12 +0000

End of November Snow Blankets UK. Source: NASA

An Entire Country Frozen

Darren/Kain — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:25:23 +0000

Day After Tomorrow Fans, eat your heart out! Source: NASA

Winter Snow Crushes the UK

Darren/Kain — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:45:13 +0000

A somewhat heavy bout of snow throughout the UK overnight during Sunday night resulted in areas of the country grinding to a complete halt.

Overnight temperatures in London hit -3° to -7° celsius leaving every public transport service cancelled for the duration of the day as upto 8" (20cm) of snow hit the capital. Yours truly ended up having the day off from work due to the buses not running. So I spent most of the day observing the news, reading ebooks and generally chilling out.

Airports faced widespread disruption after a Cyprus Airways plane skidding whilst on the runway. Eventually Heathrow closed both it’s runways and half of outbound flights were cancelled leaving foreign commuters somewhat confused as to how little snow could cause so much chaos.

Almost every school in London faced being closed for the day as travel conditions meant that a large proportion of teachers just couldn’t make it to work.

Widespread outcry was apparent as Londoner’s found the roads untreated with grit, as well as public transport ground to a standstill in conditions that other East European countries would laugh at. I suppose the rampant media reporting the winter chaos with a vengeance since they have had sod all to report on for weeks now didn’t help matters either. They made it out as armageddon was here.

Through my eyes, snow means just one thing – a chance to look back on loving childhood/high school memories of madcap snowball fights on our football fields, building miniture snowmen (complete with rude attachments) on our teachers car bonnets as well as ‘dive bombing’ other pupil’s snow men!

This was a chance for the UK to sit back and have some fun for once and most kids did just that. Most of London had literally frozen over so why not enjoy yourself? Instead the majority of us sat back and did what we do best – whined.

I decided to go down to some nearby shops during the evening and got ambushed by a bunch of schoolkids. An all out war broke out but it was clear I was on the loosing end – it was 4 vs 1 so I scampered home under a hail of snow balls. I had gone out in the hopes of taking some photos of the snow and people mucking around in it but one thing was rather clear – the iPhone’s poxy 2mp camera is utter pants for outdoor shoots in the snow!

Now that the snow storm is moving up North towards Scotland, I can only ask for one thing….

Weekend Mumblings

Darren/Kain — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:29:47 +0000

Kamikaze attack, a Wasp and WordPress

Man its hot out thar! Temperatures were hitting 28c outdoors and 30c in my room this weekend.

It was so damn hot that on Friday, a rather large fly decided to try and cool off by doing a kamikaze run straight into my left eye and completely knocked me out during a lunchtime walk by the side of the lake near my workplace. It was lodged in my upper eyeball and I could feel the bugger moving around but could I get it out?! Could I heck… I ended up walking home partially blinded, crashing in to random people as a result. I had to take a different route home too – it would be too embarrasing walking through Harrow town. Suffice to say that I eventually removed it, but fark me did that hurt!

On another note I was woken up on Saturday morning by a strange buzzing sound. It turned out to be a flaming suicidal wasp who preferred my cool pillow to the rather hot air. Needless to say this took me by complete surprise and saw me crash off the bed. A few hours later I was working under my desk rerouting some cables, and guess who I bumped in to down there? The blasted wasp was back and sent me fleeing to the nearest air freshner can. Coupled with a lighter it would be toast! Sadly the bugger had vanished by the time I had returned…

Sunday saw me writing a review for a new toy that I have, when I decided to take a break and upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.5.1 and the latest RC6 build of the superb K2 WordPress theme. WordPress installed smoothly enough but K2 RC6 has caused a few issues. WordPress 2.5.1 works slightly differently now and reads CSS in a different way so it took some getting used to. Currently this blog fails to render properly in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 – I can’t fix this without further investigation in to this issue. It is fine in Firefox, Safari and Opera as expected though. All this faffing about with WordPress meant that I failed to finish my review by Sunday night. Great I can’t even adjust to the new look dashboard…

I haven’t really written much on this blog lately so that is going to change from this point onwards. I’ll spend a lot more time tinkering around and adding new toys yay!

Wanted: The British Summer of 2007

Darren/Kain — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:32:15 +0000

10 weeks of rain fall in 24Hrs

I’ve lived in London, Middlesex my entire life and never witnessed the rainstorm that battered the UK yesterday afternoon. For those living outside the UK, let me just say that we haven’t had our summer yet. It’s been replaced by a ~~shitstorm~~ crapload of rain, and left half the UK flooded, and thousands of families homeless. I saw this coming from a mile away so I left work at 11am, in what can only be described as dark skies as I hopped off the bus and walked home. It was pitch black as I did so, and not 10mins after I reached home, I witnessed the heavens open up and just over 10 weeks worth of rain crashed over us.

Our garden flooded in no less then 5 minutes flat. Our front road flooded up in 10 minutes, but thankfully our drains were in good condition, so the flood waters receded rapidly, unlike elsewhere around the UK. The monsoon like storms swept up across the South and then proceeded to rotate around the Midlands and Wales before heading north slowly subsiding as it travelled that way. My father is pretty gutted as his garden is a complete state as we have had the contents of the adjacent gardens all merge into one and its a complete mess. Mind you, from what I’ve seen London got off lightly compared to the rest of the UK. I wish those affected by this weather all the best as they getting back on their feet.

A single photo to describe the recent UK storms…

Darren/Kain — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:56:30 +0000

Birthdays and Paintballing malarky!

Darren/Kain — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:54:22 +0000

Time to brush up on my camping skillz

Update: Well the weather has put a dampener on things. Due to the unpredictable rain storms the UK has been having for the past 2 weeks, this trip will be cancelled until further notice. Buggered if I’m going paint balling in the mud should it begin lashing it down with rain.

I spent this weekend mostly with a raging hangover as I spent Saturday at my mates RC and Renata’s place since they were having a BBQ for their gorgeous daughter Ariana, whose 1st birthday is tomorrow! Awww! Now I would put up pics from the night, but I don’t actually have permission so nooo. Sadly the BBQ took place on the same day Glastonbury 2007 was on, so it was an invitation for the bad weather to hit us – and it did. Things started out fine as we all chatted away in the garden, but then came the rain to put a dampener on things. It began pee’ing down like there was no tomorrow. Having moved indoors, I got completely drunk on the copious amounts of beer that was available until I began seeing double everytime I looked at the TV. The night ended with Mark passing out drunk and being doodled on, with makeup by various people! I’ve never sniggered so hard without actually laughing (can’t wake him can we?). I had a lovely time, so RC/Ren & Neal if you’re reading this – cheers peeps! It was so good to see some old faces I hadn’t seen in ages too.

This upcoming weekend I’m off Paint balling! It’s been about 8yrs since I last went, and this time it’s a team building excercise event at Bullswood, Surrey. Given that the QA (Quality Assurance) department are coming along so they’re Numero Uno on everyone’s hitlist it seems. I’ve got myself the Big Bad Boy package with 1 Smoke grenade! I’ll have to utilise all my ancient Counterstrike techniques to outwit the competition who aren’t all oldies either. The famous Antycamp technique could prove handy in situations where I am trapped. My only worry is that we will end up looking like we’ve battled the forces of nature herself. Last time I went paint balling we all returned home with cuts, bruises, leaves and twigs all over us, and I don’t have to mention how paintful (hurhur) it can be to be shot in the arm, let alone the face! Hopefully the weather won’t put a downer on things either.

Back injury woes

Darren/Kain — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:50:17 +0000

Down but not out!

Arf! For the past week I’ve been suffering from a nasty back injury, the result of pushing myself too hard in the gym I would guess. Thankfully the pain is beginning to show signs of subsiding. It’s so surprising when something like this hits you out of the blue, especially when you very rarely have injuries or sicknesses of any kind. Me? Suffice to say that I haven’t seen my doctor in 15yrs, since I was 16yrs old to be precise. I am the type who hates medicine of any kind, preferring to let any pain subside naturally, and having said that I was almost persuaded by friends to visit my local doctor this morning. Yet this morning upon waking up, it had almost vanished!

So I spent a solid two hours at the gym this morning literally burning up because I hadn’t been in so long and for the next few days I will feel like an 80yr old OAP as a result. To make things worse, today here in London has been blisteringly hot. I rarely feel the summer heat but today has been FARKING HOT! I arrived home an hour ago and my normally cool room is a sweltering 29.4c! Summer is here baby!

I’m still here!

Darren/Kain — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:43:37 +0000

No I’ve not died…

I’m still around and haven’t forgotten this blog at all. With summertime being a complete scorcher over here I decided to take a break and spend more time with some close friends instead of gaming, blogging etc. Last Sunday 30th myself and my parents went up north to Leicester for the first time in ages to see who I would consider as the only true family we have in the UK. There are five sisters up there who I miss terribly and haven’t seen in just over a year. I can’t even explain how good it was to see them as well as their parents once again – to the point where I didn’t want to leave the place. What’s even worse is that I want to go back there…right now.

The British heatwave was one of the highest on record, even higher then rain soaked Spain. Things were so bad over here that local council’s ended up spraying roads with sand – to stop the surface from melting! Sadly I didn’t do much this summer, mainly due to equipment at work either blowing up or just completely dying on me during this intense period. I ended up spending most of my time travelling to work out of work hours to sort out so many issues. Boring it may sound, but all I can say is – DO NOT sit on a London bus when there’s a bloody heatwave going on! Hmm, so I never went on holiday or anything like that but I did enjoy myself for once!

I’ve noticed over the last couple of days that the weather appears to be changing again. It definitely feels a lot cooler now. This can be a problem as the heatwave is indeed over now, but it also means that during the early mornings when I wake up it’s difficult to judge the day’s weather, especially when you leave the house at 5:30am. As a result, I went to work yesterday in jeans and a nice summer shirt – I got soaked as it pee’d down with rain the moment I stepped off the bus.