General Chat

hi TW .in canada they can have over a foot of snow in an afternoon .they carry on .there countrys ready for most stuff.here we have a sifting of snow .RED ALERT.when will our country learn lolol

I too used to go walk to school, even in the snow - but we could walk over fields - much easier than roads - and children went to their LOCAL school - not the (allegedly) better one 5 miles away!
Coats were draped over the fireguard of the stove that heated the classroom. Milk was drunk at breaktime. In the winter the milk would have frozen and the cream would be sticking out of the bottle wearing a gold foil cap! The milk was brought in and placed near the fire to defrost, so we ended up with milk that was warmish one side and full of icicles the other!

I live 2 miles from where I work. I managed to walk intoday - but tomorrow the ungritted roads & pavements will be unpassable.
I moved here 20 odd years ago, and remember men from the council with wheelbarrows shovelling grit onto the pavements.
Now they don't even bother gritting the roads around here. We no longer have a local shop, so it appears everyone - even the elderly from the sheltered housing scheme - is expected to walk one and a half miles - a mile of that on ungritted roads - to the nearest shop!

...and no, I don' live in the middle of nowhere - I live in Winchester - allegedly one of the richest cities - and one with a very high council tax - just above the M3. I can't tell you how galling it is to hear the cars coming from outside the city speeding on a motorway our council tax has paid to grit, parking in the park & ride all day for £2.70, getting on a bus (every 10 minutes) that is usually running, while we (the locals) just a spit away from the park & ride are the first to have our bus (one every half hour if we're lucky) cut, and our bus fare is 50p less than outsiders pay to park their car & go twice the distance on a bus!


sorry - rant over!
considered

Ann, when there is six inches of snow on the ground and your car gets stuck on the way out of your drive, skids on the road, etc etc, sorry but would you drive and put yourself at risk like that?

Yes teachers do live a lot further away from their schools these days, and why should they put themselves at risk more than anyone else, especially when the advice in some parts is not to drive at all.

All I'm saying is that we have changed a lot in the last forty years or so, we live much much differently now, and we forget that we cannot carry on as normal, ie driving ourselves everywhere. We can't always compensate by walking instead, as we live too far away, especially compared to how we used to live close to our work, we all had jobs local to us, and usually within walking or at least cycling distance, so leaving the car at home and walking posed no problem.

We rely far too much on our cars nowadays, in a way we never used to. As a society we are not prepared to walk these days, besides we often do live too far away. But we expect that we should be able to whatever the weather and we forget that nature is bigger and stronger than we are.