Closed and open roads

Though it has a powerful exhaust and the gases are a potent mixture of hot and pretty destructive materials we can't be blamed for the massive woodland destruction and subsequent blocked roads that have occurred around here. The usual routes are impassable and the everything else is either part blocked up or covered in a carpet of debris and dead foliage. Of course last year at this time we were suffering a foot and more of snow and more slipping and sliding and digging out than I've ever experienced and it was minus 10. Yesterday it was a balmy 11 degrees but the wind still clocked 100mph, that's at least 4000rpm in a Cougar, downhill with a good following breeze.

At home due to this peculiar weather and serial pylon collapse the electricity has disappeared back up it's own corrupted exhaust pipe, so coal, candles and batteries are keeping us going surprisingly well, that's country life for you. I suspect that if the power failure carries on it'll be a drive through breakfast of some sort tomorrow to prepare me for the return to work and a frantic recharging of the soon to be dead mobile devices, perhaps we should also be investing in a small Honda generator to ensure a level of business continuity during these spikes of inconvenient catastrophe,or maybe I should just try wiring the Cougar's lump up to the domestic supply, has this been done?

Even in the grip of Hurricane Bawbag II I was able to top up the ever diminishing oil supply, we're on about a strong and imperial pint a week right now but still getting 38.4 mpg. There's life in the greasy old cat yet though I'd not bet on him/her making the planned (2015) cannonball trip to the Arctic Circle via Greece, Poland and Portugal and of course passing over the highest road in Europe at the same time. Nothing like doing Europe the hard way (and this is nothing like ...etc.). The next chapter will most likely be more fiction and less fact but you can never really tell.