The webmasters Editors Bable and soapbox page

Editors Babble

Text Box: So the White stuff is back again, and so are the complaints In way of an excuse, I wasn’t actually born in Charing Parish, sorry about that, I didn’t actually have much say in the matter.. For my sins, I was born in ‘Stalisfield Green’. ( I am still waiting for the Blue Plaque to appear). Though I did get it right eventually, and moved to Charing in 53, (That is 1953 and not 1853, as suggested by someone recently). I went through all that, just so you might know that I have lived on the Downs for a long time, and have met the local weather extremes on more than one occasion. 1953, 1957, 1963, 1967 etc etc etc. I, unfortunately, have done a lot of miles on the road. Last add up, around 1.5 million miles. (I do about 100,000 miles a year at the moment). Now if you put those two bits of info together, you get the idea that I might have met a bit of snow while driving. This year we got, the now normal, cries of ’THEY’ aren't doing enough to clear the roads, ’THEY’ aren't out early enough, etc etc. While guiding one driver out of a ditch that he had slid into, I heard the whine about how the road should have been cleared hours before, and that if ‘THEY’ had done the job properly, the driver wouldn’t have gone off. When I asked what preparation the driver had done for his journey, he looked a bit bemused, ‘why should I do any preparation’? Had he put on winter tyres, did he carry a set of chains, what emergency equipment did he have with him. Had he ever undergone winter driver training, what about checking before he started if the road was fit to travel on. Then the final question which seemed to totally confuse him, why was he driving so quickly that he went off the road in the first place? So next time, before blaming everything on the ‘gritter’ driver, who has probably been working for 15 or 16 hours without a break, ask a few basic questions of yourself. For a start, do you really have to be driving in the snow in the first place? ((As for the driver in the ditch?, sorry, I left him there, the rest of us were probably safer with him off the road while the snow was about))... Vox soon Jonathan Ryan