Thursday 11 December 2008

Jimmy the Ice Cube

The following Wednesday, this was the sight that greeted me when I came out of the house:



Poor, icy Jimmy. I had to pry open the door, and I had no hope of opening the windows. Luckily I had bought some de-icer spray the day before, although I'm not sure it's so good for my car. It immediately turns the ice to slush, which is plain weird. And heaven forbid you should leave trace elements of it on the windscreen! That stuff is harder to get rid of than a kid on Christmas Eve.

That Wednesday also marked my first experience of driving on ice. I don't like it. Torrential rain? No problems. Oil on the road? Sure. Ice? Hell no. It's just plain unpredictable. Granted, I'm being a bit of a wuss, because it wasn't black ice. But you just can't count on seeing white stuff on the road and thinking that it's frost. What also didn't help was that a taxi driver smashed his car up on the road I take to go to work. It caused all kinds of problems with traffic (not helped by the fact that every road into London from the south east was closed due to other accidents). My usual 15 minute journey took a lot longer than usual, broken only by a small touch of the giggles when I finally got the windows to open and the ice literally cracked and flew off.

Long story short, driving on ice is sucky.

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