always someone else

Whenever it gets cold and slippy I'm always conscious that it's nowhere near as cold and slippy in the city centre as amongst the Lands Outwith the Bypass as evidenced by the snow still stuck on the rooves of cars in the morning (and doing their streamlining and fuel efficiency no good whatsoever) and the extra-nippy gusts that send people's chins scurrying for their collars when they walk into a vaguely high spot or openish space. Now that my bicycle has been fixed and returned I can now tentatively pootle out of the city at some point into some proper snow and decent cold which stays for longer than five minutes and almost requires covered lower legs. There was almost no-one else around the hill this evening apart from three people (or at least three bobbing sources of light) descending the circum-Seat road (fortunately seemingly at a rate of their own choosing) and lots of people steaming exceedingly dangerously swiftly in motor-cars along the road. The cycle track and footpath were so icy I could drift for yards with a single little push and had to walk on the grass to get any traction; the road was still mostly thawed-ish but it still amazes me that people think they can handle cars well enough to drive them arseholically in adverse conditions. Oddly enough the only car doing anything like anything under twenty was one of those roller-skatey small sportscar things judging by its silhouette. The constant cold of the former railway tunnel is now warmer than the surroundings and supported liquid water and therefore life in the form of a student running back and forth along it. I went for the steps back up to the road instead of the path as they seemed a little less completely devoid of any traction but as they're the sort of steps which slope slightly downwards I was relying on a very small amount of grip available from the protruding wood at the step's edge to get anywhere at all and had to do some unseemly crouching and grabbing gorse bushes at several points to avoid sliding back down to the bottom.