More Snow here in the Peak District

It’s snowing again as I look out of the office window. There is about 3 inches everywhere, no wind so it’s just coming straight down and not being blown around.

Swapped our 7 year old Toyota RAV 4 for a 3 month old ex-demo Nissan Pathfinder on Wednesday. It has 7 seats so we can now use just 1 car for courses, it is also considerably larger inside so has more space for our exhibition stand stuff for when we do shows. Then Thursday we used it to go to Melbourne, the one just south of Derby rather than the one in Australia, where I gave a lecture. It was snowing as we drove over the Peak District. On the way home all well until about 10 miles north of Ashbourne heading for Buxton, the road was blocked by an accident (the road was covered by snow but underneath was black ice – very slippery). We turned round and returned to Ashbourne for fuel, all garages shut so on to Derby then returned to Ashbourne. Another accident on the A52 had blocked the road since we came through so we sat there for over a half hour (now 1.30 am). Then traffic reports on the sat nav showed the A6 blocked by another accident near Buxton so we decided to try returning through Leek and Macclesfield, which was fine. Just the 4 hours to do a 1.5h journey, arriving home at 3am! The car was rock solid on some very dodgy roads, a good test for the 4 wheel drive. Needless to say I decided to drive into the Buxton Gallery a few hours later rather than walking since I have to get up at 6am if I’m walking to give me time to do my stretches for my bad back and I need more than 2.5h sleep!

It’s been trying to snow on and off for several days now but today we have had 3 or 4 inches and the hills look great. It’s stopped snowing and it’s brightening up.

Don’t forget, Focus on Imaging at the NEC Birmingham starts in exactly 2 weeks time – Sunday 7th March. I will be on the Harman Technology stand near the entrance to Hall 9 doing the launch and signing of my new book Lake Light. Hope to see some of you there. Dave Butcher