Snow Days and Seminars

We had a snow day at work yesterday. The plan was to do the usual weekly environmental monitoring fieldwork at Moor House National Nature Reserve, the primary site of peatland research for the department I work in. However Mother Nature, bless her, had other plans.

This was the snow at the road to Moor House. Our tyre tracks were the only snow disturbance for miles around. It was breathtakingly beautiful; a completely different world. Especially as Lancaster didn't have a single flake of snow all day! Anyway, the snow was so deep and drifting so much that we abandoned all fieldwork plans and came back again because the risk of getting stuck up there was too great. Which would not be the best idea; it's too remote for any phone signal, we were three hours walk from any kind of help and I'd got peckish on the car journey there and eaten half my lunch already.

And I'm very glad we did turn around in hindsight because as soon as we started driving home the heavens opened again and the heaviest snow storm I think I've ever seen started. The flakes were so giant and dense that the world was white in a matter of minutes.

Heading back south along the motorway was a bit scary; we could barely see because the snow was so thick and only the inside lane was safe to drive on. Still, we made it back to Lancaster in one piece where everyone seemed a bit doubtful as to how much so there was a mere few miles northwards. I spend the afternoon database inputting and then rewarded myself with the best thing ever after a morning battling the elements on a remote, windswept moor...a Starbucks signature hot chocolate.

I met my ex-housemate from my previous (and disastrous) Lancaster house-share and we caught up on what we'd been up to over Christmas and how our respective jobs/university courses are going (she's training to be a mid-wife, way too much contact with other people's bodily fluids for my liking but I guess someone's got to do it!) whilst attempting (and largely failing) to drink hot chocolate in a respectable way i.e. without getting whipped cream all over our noses.

Then I had to run home and meet Kasia, a girl I met through work who is studying for her PhD on a very similar topic to what I am currently researching for my dissertation. She recently moved to Reading but was back in Lancaster to attend the Moor House seminar today. I offered her a sofa to stay on so she could arrive in Lancaster a day earlier than the seminar for a catch-up and a drink. Except this drink was of the alcoholic variety and involved the pub quiz. A group of us from work always got to the pub quiz at The Sun every week in an attempt to usurp the team of elderly know-it-alls from the top spot. They always still win but we do get a selection of free cheese (Lancaster is seriously obsessed with cheese I have found) and bread half way through the evening.

The seminar was quite good today, though it's a bit of a surreal feeling to be chatting to someone who you've admired from afar for their views on dissolved organic carbon trends published in Nature journal articles over the provided lunch of steak pie and some sort of strange looking vegetable paste. My dad was there too because he works for an environmental management company and I had all his colleagues coming up to me and saying "Ooooh, I haven't seen you since were THIS big!" They seemed to find it surprising that I had somewhat matured in the last 10 years. Still, I suspect I too will be guilty of exclaiming "My, how you've grown!" at such events in the future to some little toerag out there who is currently unable to eat solids but will blog about how annoying it is that old people can't believe child do, in fact, grow up.

I'm blabbing now. Goodnight.

H x