Life is an adventure......

Management is at times very managerial, this afternoon faced with our continuing problems, all completely out of our control, she made an executive decision: she went back to bed to catch up on some sleep.

Today has been nothing if not complex.

It's no big deal not being able to get up the drive as we can simply stoke up the fire and sit it out.

There is an "however" to that though...

What to do about the 4 young people who were not here.

This was more than a little complex.

First and easiest to deal with was Bruce who has another exam tomorrow so we had already draughted a contingency plan which involved her staying put close to college at her half sisters house.

2 other children though were in high school some 25 miles away. The bus brought them back to town but that was as much use as the proverbial ashtray on a motor bike.

They could of course have walked home but that would just have meant they might well have died.

This was made the more difficult as conditions in town were wet and windy but there was no snow. So it was hard to get over to them how bad things are up here.

However, we managed to get a friend of ours to take them in for the night and there they stayed.

That was 3/4 of the problem solved. It just left Taliesin.

Now he is a sensible enough chap who would not normally do anything daft.

Unknown to us he had been on his college bus for several hours when it got stuck on the way to town.

He tried to arrange to stay with one of his friends but then changed his mind and decided to accept an offer to go and stay with a another friend a bit closer to home, who was at home having come in from school.

All well and fine but of course with his step brother not at home at his flat in town Tallie would have been too tight to go and wait in a pub (and have to pay money for a drink) he decided to start walking.

It was not clear at this stage where rain stopped and snow started and neither was it certain his friends father would be able to get the car up the hill to collect him.

So there was a real time possibility he was walking into a snow storm with little in the way of protective gear.

This is just a little short of an optimal situation.

So anyway, I called another mate who set off from town to try and catch him up and bring him back.

We had an anxious few minutes when the man himself was missing and it was not clear if no one friend had managed to get out of the valley or no 2 friend could get out of town to find him.

I gave serious thought to mounting a do or die attempt to get the fire engine out, which could have left me stuck in a drift somewhere on my own with 7.5 tons of fire engine which might have been a bit difficult to dig out on my own. But I could at least have left here with proper clothes an artic sleeping bag, goretex bivvi and survival gear in case I needed to sit it out.

Everything worked out fine in the end but it could easily have turned very nasty, as it was we had an interesting stressful 30 minutes till the man himself turned up safe, well and wondering what all the fuss was about..

Management has recovered some of her composure now and we are settled to a quiet night in our living room with iplayer and a stove that has heated the living room to 21C and our bedroom to 16C.

The tropic it isn't but for a 300 year old house it's pretty good.

I poked my nose out of the door and it is now looks even worse than it did earlier.

Everyone has been informed that no one goes outside in the morning till I have taken photos!!

It has also just struck me that, without the water being on we would not have been able to risk running our oil boiler. So we would have been without central heating, the last week or two. Boy that would have been fun.

Ah well.

Time tochill err relax with a gottle of gine methinks.

There is a new series of a BBC drama called "survivors" starting in a bit, I think, in the current weather, I can relate to that....

Where is the corkscrew?

R