The good news: the snow plough came up again this morning, right up our drive.
The bad news: the snow plough came up again this morning, right up our drive.
The tractor driver got the location of the hard-packed drive under the snow completely wrong and has dug up the grassy verge with all that was planted in it. Not only that, but he had the plough set too low and has bulldozed around 5 centimetres off the surface of our driveway and left huge piles of hard core at either side. Not only that but he's turned the triangular area by our post box, where the postman turns his van every day, into a half-metre high muddy bank, in the process preventing our neighbours down in the valley from passing until it's been cleared. All the work that I did on the drive this summer - creating nice grassy borders, planting along the edges of the driveway, cleaning and de-mossing the compacted gravel that forms (formed) its surface, painstakingly reshaping it with an edging tool - is b*&&ered, in just 3 minutes.
We are not amused.
It's stopped snowing (for now), but this morning it was minus 10 just outside, and similar temperatures are forecast for another week. Our main road, like most roads in the department, is still impassable without chains because although they've been cleared they're impossibly icy, and there are reputedly more cars to be seen in ditches than on the roads ....
Still, we're promised a hot afternoon: 0 degrees Celsius. Shorts and tee shirts then.
8 comments:
Yes, those snow plough drivers do seem to have special skill. Round here, the ploughs leave an inch of hard-packed, glossily polished snow especially for drivers to enable their cars to take up skating.
Yes, same here. The guys that clear the tracks are just local farmers though. My glimpse of this one's tail end as he hurtled away at 30km an hour showed that he's the same guy that horribly flailed our laurel bushes back in the autumn when he was cutting the verges of the track :-(
6 weeks to opening and he's just given us a good 2 weeks work we didn't have yesterday ...
Thank goodness we won't be there for any snow!
Breathe deeply, no matter the way it looks, folks will understand and might get a good chuckle out of it right along with you.
Please let us know how it goes with your very first guests!
Yes, you're right, Sandee, there will come a time where we'll laugh at this, just as we now do at the builder - um - misfortunes that had us crawling up the walls at the time ... Right now I'm doing compensatory cooking and making a huge pan of zuppa alla frantoiana!
In Germany there would be big liability issues. Don't you have any recourse against the state for the damage that was caused, or would that get you tarred and feathered?
Probably it would have been the same in the UK, too, BB - compensation culture reigns and all that, even if it was just one small local farmer doing an inept job with a snow plough! Here, most people just don't think that way - unless you're talking life threatening injury or something; it's more a case of 'c'est comme ça' and a shrug of the shoulders. I actually prefer that: breathe out, move on. This too will pass.
'I actually prefer that: breathe out, move on. This too will pass.' and you'll soon be laughing,telling the story to guests over a kir.
Exactement!
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