Caution – contains swearing.
It’s been an absolute joke, today. The A52 is still closed southbound, so traffic is having to find its way across the Trent elsewhere. But that’s why I made sure I wasn’t teaching during the rush hour.
Or, at least that was the plan. You see, I didn’t take into account the Met Office – a weather forecasting agency that gets it wrong even when it tries to tell people what it can see out of its windows.
I had a lesson at 1pm. As we drove away from his house, it began to rain. A few minutes later I commented that it was now sleet, as you could see the ice crystals on the windscreen as the drops hit. By this time we were heading up Woodborough Road towards Mapperley, and I said ‘ just watch when we get to the top – it’ll be proper snow at that altitude’. And it was, although it wasn’t settling.
Mapperley is one of the highest points in Nottingham. If it’s drizzly in the city, it’s pissing down in Mapperley. If it’s a bit hazy in Colwick, there’ll be thick fog in Mapperley. And as I predicted today, if there’s a bit of sleet down below, Mapperley will have lying snow. But I wasn’t worried, because no weather forecasts today had said we’d get any heavy snow in Nottingham. I checked.
We drove down Arnold Lane towards Gedling, and the snow got wetter as we descended and eased off. We did a circuit through Burton Joyce and Stoke Bardolph, then finished up at the Victoria Retail Park to have ago with the road layouts around there and a manoeuvre. While we were there, the snow got heavier – it was those little balls that bounce off glass – and I noticed it began to accumulate around kerbstones.
Then we headed home towards the city centre at about 2.20pm. Traffic was light around the Retail Park, and it was the same all the way back up Arnold Lane – until we got near to the top. By now, the snow was falling heavily in huge flakes, and the road was covered. The traffic came to a complete standstill and was not moving, most likely because some twat had slammed their brakes on at the bottom of the first dip and couldn’t get up the other side. We turned around and headed back down to go via a different route. Traffic was still free-moving, and we managed to get all the way through Gedling, up Carlton Hill, and through Carlton itself. Then, we were at a standstill again, just before Porchester Road. And this time there was nowhere else to go.
That was just after 2.30pm. To cut a long story short, I finally dropped the pupil off outside his house at just before 5pm. It took us over an hour to move from Nottingham High School to Russell View (a quarter of a mile) along Forest Road, and his 1.5 hour lesson had lasted 4 hours! I didn’t get home until just before 7pm. I’d cancelled my evening lesson because the pupil lives off Porchester Road with all the steep roads, and he’d told me they were bad.
The snow began at just after 1pm, and by 2pm it was falling heavily higher up. When I got home, I went to the BBC website and discovered those f***ing twats at the Met Office had issued a Yellow Warning for snow in the Midlands at 3.07pm! Over a f***ing hour after it had already fallen and caused traffic to come to a standstill.
Can someone please explain to me what the Met Office actually does? Because it sure as hell doesn’t involve predicting short-term weather conditions.