By guest blogger Pete.Everyone here was hoping that the cold, frosty and snow bound weather that we had been experiencing over Christmas and the New Year was over. Yet here we are in February and, although not, generally, as cold as it has been, we are still getting some snow and very heavy frosts.
This looks like a fun slide:As a boy heavy frosts were much more welcome then than they are now to an old crinkly. The playground at our school was on a slope and we lads soon had a number of slides going on those frosty days. Most of us wore metal protectors on our shoes - very common in the days soon after the war because the idea was that they would make our shoes last much longer. I do know that when we marched down the school corridor to our classes it sounded like the St Valentine's Day Massacre was taking place. Those metal protectors, however, were good for polishing slides. Those slides were like glass and a continuous stream of lads sliding along them soon made them into a skating rinks.
No teachers ever told us that such slides were dangerous and, therefore, that we should neither make them nor enjoy them. The present day Granny State with its "Health and Safety" regulations wasn't even thought about then. The only possible "hurt" involved with these slides was to a boy's pride if he couldn't remain upright when sliding.
I was buying some more de-icer products the other day when I came across a product called "The Night Before". For anyone like me who can't use their garage or don't have a garage then this is a very useful product indeed. You apply it on the evening when frost is expected and then the next morning you don't get frost bite on your digits trying to clear ice from the screen and windows. Once, when living in Warminster, I can remember the screen and windows being iced up both outside and also inside the car. This was not in a morning but on a rather late evening when returning from some long forgotten excursion. After much scrapping I managed to get a "port hole" of clearness in the windscreen and with that vision crept the 1/2 mile or so back to our home.
I finished the latest Lincoln Cathedral painting this week. A scanned photo of it is shown below. I was somewhat surprised by the comparatively short time this masterpiece took me. When you look at it you may not be as surprised as I was!! The next painting is going to be a smaller one; that means, probably, that it will take me to Easter before I get in finished.
Keep on with the de-icer. They do say that Spring's not too far away.
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