Glacial Ireland

What a bizarre week. Classes are cut down to nearly none in winter anyway, but the sporadic closing of Dublin airport due to snowfall combined with Dublin’s transport system coping quite incredibly poorly has meant I’ve spent the best part of the last week and a half either catching up with some writing or doing things that fall somewhere between ‘nothing’ and ‘a pointless pastime’. To give one example, I’m currently running at somewhere between Irish and Australian time, in order to watch the Ashes.

There’s been about six inches of snow (at least, there was still five inches sat on our windowsill until yesterday, and it’s above the heater). Last week I tried to take the luas (tram) to work and had to turn round and walk back along the tracks for nearly an hour because some idiot child had built a snowman on the track, and the service had to be shut down for several hours to fix it. Cost to myself and the company’s not huge, but there were a lot of people on that tram, and it stopped for several hours. Like Ireland needs more economic problems now.

The buses have been the same, and while I made it out to my class on Friday, it turned out my student had already turned around and gone home, as he (rightly, I suspect) didn’t trust the bus services to continue until the end of the class.

Now the snow’s stopped, temporarily (forecast is for more tonight), Dublin’s pavements have turned into these glacial-like slabs of ice, each packed really tight, horrendously slippy and showing no sign of melting. A few nights ago we bottomed out at -14C. I thought it was still November. Even if the snow stops, I think the ice will either need to be dug out (which no one seems to be doing, aside from the odd store), or will sit there for a few weeks to come. Note to self: must move somewhere hotter before next winter.

And that, folks, is probably (I hope) my only ever blog entry on weather. On the plus side, it beats blogging on the Irish economy. I must get round to writing about the more exciting twists in life recently…

James x

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