Mind you, when you read on you find, of course, that they’re talking about INLAND Galicia. Places like Vigo and Pontevedra still have minimum predicted temperatures of 5° and 6° and maximums of around 11°. The people of more inland places would find that positively balmy.
The picture comes from a place called O Cebreiro, in Lugo province, where you expect it to snow in winter. They had 10 centimetres of snow overnight. Mind you there roads were cleared. The “quitanieves” –snow ploughs – were busy making sure of that. And people are being advised to put their chains on their cars if they head to these snowy, mountainous places. We’re predicted snow here in the grey North West but it hasn’t happened yet. People are warned about not doing unnecessary journeys but o-one has mentioned winter tyres or chains on your wheels. We just don’t have that kind of winter-prepared culture in the UK. I wonder if they do in the north of Scotland.
Anyway, the snow has not yet arrived, just the cold weather replacing the milder stuff we had got used to. Despite the cold, I’ve been surprised the last few mornings at the lack of frost around. Not that I’m complaining. At least it’s stopped raining, for the time being, and we’ve even managed to get a little sunshine, albeit rather pale and wan. It’s even been fine enough for our window cleaner to come round and go up his ladders to clear the gutters. We’ve been trying to arrange this since the autumn set in. First of all we agreed that it was a good idea to wait until the leaves had stopped falling. After that it was just too rainy. But it was clear that it needed doing as the last time it really rained heavily the downpour just ran down the back of the house instead of down the downspout. As he told me when he’d finished, our lawn is no longer in the gutter and we’re ready for the next torrential rainstorm.
It was a little worrying, however, to see him setting up his ladders at the back of the house. Our house is one of those odd ones where you go in through the front door, imagining that to be the ground floor, and then go downstairs to what should be the cellar, only to find that the back door opens onto the back garden. So one end of our kitchen/dining room is underground while the other opens onto the garden. The ground slopes down the side of the house. (We were fortunate when the basement flat next door flooded recently because of collapsed water pipes that it was discovered in time before it could come through into our kitchen. The flat has had to be completely re-done so we feel that we escaped quite nicely.)
One consequence of this architectural quirk – actually quite common in this area – is that the window cleaner had to go up three floors to reach the gutter. His ladders went a loooong way up. What’s more he had no-one supporting the base of the ladder as he worked. Whatever happened to health-and-safety? Clearly it doesn’t apply to the self-employed. But it was quite disconcerting to look up and see his piratical face go past the window – he wears an eye-patch aver since he was attacked by a bunch of thugs some years ago – and carry on up and up.
But our pirate friend survived his adventure and we have nice clean gutters, until the next time.
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