More snow...

I woke up this morning at 6.30 am to silence and a world of white. We have had snow, real snow, for the first time since I came to live in Manchester some twenty years ago. Crisp, clean, white, cold and deep.

After helping my neighbour across the road push her car (along with 4 other pushers) back into the drive where she had moved it from I thought about going into work. After ten seconds or so I stopped thinking about it. The snow is ten inches deep and it continues to snow.

The airport is closed, Holly's school (5 mins up the road) is closed, Gaynor's college is closed and the car park of the building where I work is closed - Manchester is at a standstill.

In another age we would have called this 'snowed in', perhaps we still do, but back then 'snowed in' meant 'stopped world' - so, isn't it amazing that within five minutes I can take a photo on my camera phone, write a blog post, e-mail my colleagues, and upload it all to Twitter and Facebook from the relative warmth of my kitchen.

The wonders of the modern world.

Wierd weather at sea...

We went across to Trevor at the weekend. I’ve always thought that Trefor is an odd place - it’s quiet, empty, even a little unsettling, tucked away at the northern entrance to the Llyn. Trefor used to be a quarry town and the quarry buildings still perch on the side of Yr Eifl like a huge, grey fortress in a fantasy novel. The beach is littered with chunks of quarried granite, sometimes we take a drive down to the beach to watch the sea, and that’s what we did this weekend despite the snow and rain. It is just the place for a weird event.

I sat in the car counting the grey waves rolling in and as I watched out over the sea a strange milky white light began to develop. High in the sky at first but moving quite quickly, it seemed to fall into the sea where it hovered just skimming the waves, shimmering and pulsing. Something was happening out at sea, something strange and something that I’d never seen before.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeSuddenly I was in a Spielberg film - and it was running in my head as I watched the sea. A UFO had cloaked itself inside a cloud of light so that it could come close to the earth and take up seawater to restock its depleted cooling tanks. The aliens had found a way to power their ship using seawater as both a coolant and a quasar synthesised fuel, but had begun to run dangerously low on their way to Alpha Centauri where they we due to seed a barren asteroid with synthetic sub-lifes. They urgently needed the water to cool the dark matter held within the crystalorator, and were only minutes away from exploding. I held my breath. If they were too late then this would be the end of the world. I watched and waited for the craft to appear from inside the cloud. Streams of vapour spiralled down from the craft and dissipated as the strange white light continued to shimmer, inside the shimmer something started to change as gradually a multi-coloured band of light emerged from the cloud, hanging above the water where it glowed and became stronger with each passing second. It was beautiful. I must have been seeing the light from the engines as they prepared to warp.

“Take me with you. Take me with you. Klaatu barada nikto” I cried!

The skies opened, we were hit by a massive hail storm, and by the time it was over both the light and the spaceship were gone. It must have been the kinetic energy from the ship reaching warp that had caused the storm, I knew that the ice crystals wouldn’t last long and if I was to get one back to my laboratory in time to analyse it I’d have to move fast.

I could have gone on. The movie was still running in my head - but I gave up there. It was time to go, and as I turned the car to drive up the steep road from the beach the credits began to roll. Keifer Sutherland had played me.

Keifer Sutherland, good choice!