abruzzi spur

Down in our flat in Brighton for the night. It's been a beautiful sunny day, mild and springlike. In the last hour or so the wind has started to whip up. Nothing unusual yet for Brighton as we watch out to sea into the face of the incoming weather. This old Georgian place has seen a few storms in its times, looks like another one is on the way. This was the view just before sunset:

Ah but that's just what they want you to think......

This is catnip for conspiracy theorists, all fuelled by (anti) social media. I expect it will be 'revealed' soon that the virus is being unleashed via chemtrails (you know, the things that normal people call contrails but are in fact evil works of sinister forces to keep us all in our place).

Hi SFQ, huge thanks for the great work you do in the NHS. The trouble as I see it is that if info is given out about where people have been found to be infected then it just fuels exactly the hysteria we all want to avoid. Mobs, innocent people harassed, pitchforks at dawn and all that. Let's all keep some perspective.

For goodness sake. This is clearly something to be addressed but it is not the end of the world. My eldest is a student doctor in the NHS and they are dealing with it calmly and rationally based on science. Not on hysteria. Lots of posts on this thread are going to look utterly ridiculous in 6 months time.

Nope. 110m asl in the Surrey Hills. Had snow every year since we moved here from SW London in 2005 but nothing this winter and no chance of any. Last few years has been minimal anyway. This looks like the future to me, not that I really mind any more.

Good grief. It's a new virus, yes there are some serious challenges to address but some of the 'end of days' posts on here are quite remarkable. It really makes me think about the role of social media, people regurgitating poorly sourced information and treating it as truth. Often it's people railing against what they call the 'mainstream media' without any understanding that what those organisations report has to be double, triple checked before going live. Why are so many people willing to believe conspiracy theory garbage? Maybe it makes them feel superior.

Might stop some from being so grizzly.....

Yes, and with no other factors at play at all. As I say, remarkable.

Well Feb you're a medical specimen. Flu every month must mean 2 weeks of flu then 2 weeks off then 2 weeks on again throughout the winter, and presumably a different strain each time. Remarkable.

Yep that's the definition of flu on the NHS website.

Influenza? You realise that an average case of flu knocks you out for at least a week or more. In bed, feeling like death. Flu is not a cold. People say they've got the flu when most of the time they haven't and they'd sure as anything know if they did.

You got flu once a month in winter? Flu? Not a sniffle or a headache or feeling a bit funny? Flu? Influenza. Every month? Blimey, you should submit yourself to medical science. You must have had 3 different strains of flu over each winter. That's amazingly unlucky. No wonder you use so many wipes. Flippin eck, I do wonder about the nation's tendency to hypochondria.

Reading this thread I'm amazed some on here ever go out at all. 'In pubs there isn't hot water'. Did you last go to the pub in 1886? I mean some of them now have air conditioning and nice food and regular customers that aren't killed off by disease and as a result keep coming back.

I recommend Senakot

As we gain?

Maybe the moon is not in Capricorn after all. Or something.

How sad are you lot, all reading this thread as the new decade starts. And as for those posting here..... shocking. Ah yes, I see your point.

Funny isn't it how things change. I used to crave snow and ice. I was 13 in the winter of 78/79, living in Bristol and it was the perfect spell of winter weather for my age. With hindsight it was probably only a couple of weeks out of the whole winter but when you're young a week is an age. In 87 aged 22 I was in Liverpool which was not deeply cold where we were, moderated by the sea and the Mersey, but there were some great falls of snow. In 1991 living in Wimbledon at the summit of what, in London, passes for high ground, the Common was frigid, the ground hard like iron and I have a photo of me, looking thin then and not just by a trick of the lens, in my flying jacket standing in the middle but on top of a deep frozen pond in the ice leaning hard on the 'danger thin ice' sign. Since then not so many memories that have stuck. 2010 December down here in the Surrey Hills was really snowy and cold. That's the last time I wore my crampons, walking the pavements thick with verglas and people tottering and falling wondering how I was immune as my 12 steel points pierced the carapace of ice and gripped the frozen snow beneath. I've done some winter mountaineering in Scotland, Aonach Eagach ridge, Beinn A'Chorrain north east ridge, winter skills on the Ben. In the Alps autumn mountaineering above Chamonix, proper hard going in landscapes of utter beauty. Roped together, ice axes, crampons on rigid boots, the light from head torches turning the ice blue at 4am and skimming across the narrow openings to crevasses into which you could fall and drag your friends. Here some are though, same as every year (I used to be one), looking for a 'chase' for wintry nirvana that is offered, or at least teased, by a few on this site but rarely if ever delivered. My approach these days is to assume it will be mild most of winter and with rain at levels around or above average. We might get a few days of cooler than average and maybe the odd burst of cold but nothing of any import. I still want to spend some time in air cold enough to hurt my lungs and clear enough at night to see for ever.

Shaping hemi... forms to await as we gain waa takes up tick in clickety clock ricket stoppety clock. Last years a SECOND HAND... flusted bush but now it's Omega/Rolex timing to the spot just need to squeeze Patients

I can see the headlines now.. 'It's the Moon Wot Won It' Lunar, eh? Well it least it sounds close to the correct word

Are you hanging that ghost until it's (truly) dead?

Oh dear. I'll leave it there I think.

Phobias are not nice. But....... First of all spiders are not insects. Secondly, without insects we're in big trouble: Without Bugs, We Might All Be Dead WWW.GOOGLE.CO.UK There are 1.4 billion insects per person on this planet and we need (almost) every one of them. It seems a rather extreme reaction to want insects wiped out and for your preferred means of achieving this to be something on a par with The Day After Tomorrow.

I used to love winter. That's what I say to people now, in my 55th year, whenever the subject comes up. It's still what I say to myself. I don't love winter any more; I wonder if I ever really did. Maybe I've constructed a romantic idea of winter, an ideal form that I've convinced myself was real and actually, looking back, might never have been. There were times when, of course, it was glorious. Living in Bristol there was the winter of 78/79 when snow fell deep and I remember thinking that the frozen pavements were thick with verglas so solid that it would never melt. I had a Saturday job in a fishing tackle shop in the centre and walked in on a Saturday for my daily wage of £5 (hey kids that's about 62.5p an hour) with all the roads snowbound, closed and nothing moving. The owners of the shop lived up in the Mendips and I knew they had no chance of getting in and that the shop wouldn't open but I wanted to say to myself that I'd tried. I never told them that I'd got there, touched the door, turned around and walked home. But those days aside, and walking onto the frozen pond on Wimbledon Common in 1987 and leaning theatrically on the 'Danger Thin Ice' sign, and December 2010 here in the Surrey Hills (bizarrely the last time I've worn my crampons in anger), what's the rest been like? Dark, damp and gloomy. I really dislike the short daylight hours and half light from 3pm. 3pm! For goodness sake. Despite this it only takes a re-read of A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas to get me wavering. As he puts it: 'I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six'. The whole piece is a beautiful read, I really recommend it. I suppose the upshot is that I love the idea of winter, where log fires glow and snow is crisp and deep (I'll forgo the 'even' bit), but really that idea is founded on a few weeks over my lifetime and that's not really a sound basis for love. In the meantime, it's dark too soon and on my 16 mile walk in the Surrey Hills yesterday it was still and grey and shrivelled blackberries were huddled tight on their stems.