The cold Sun

I was wondering the other day, it's a good thing these scientist types changed their panic attack headlines from 'Global Warming' to 'Climate Change'. Any reference to global warming would attract a well aimed, powerful and solid kick to the referer's bottom. Allow me to explain.

Thanks to my undying efforts, the world now knows what greeted me the day after I bought my scooter. The underlying hope at that point in time was that this too would come to pass and in a fortnight the sun would come out of hibernation, provide heat and light and all that. What a load of BS that turned out to be.

It's now more than a month since said scooter entered the household and the Sun has been as lazy as ever. The bloke can slumber like a bear in hibernation, I tell you. It began getting cold and nippy way back in November. The days are getting longer now, but they sure as hell ain't getting any warmer.

When I first moved the UK, one of the major draws, for me, was the rain. This is a fact I've had to justify to every single person that has ever asked me why I chose to leave a sunny country like Dubai and come to wet and dreary UK. The normal reaction to this statement is to look at me like I have just eaten a live crocodile. Some even look at me like they did when they found out there is no Santa Claus. Once the initial shock of my statement passes by, they eventually recover and in less than 2 days, they return to their normal selves and dismiss me as an eccentric madman. I found their line of reasoning for such a reaction a bit on the cuckoo side, but I understand it better now.

Coming from a country where rain hits the headlines and only does that around 3-4 days in a year, it felt good to have regular rain again. It felt good back in the day, but like they say, too much of a good thing soon turns bad. It's rained around 3-4 days a week for the past 4 months and I've had my fill of rain, thank you very much. The temperature gauge on the dash of my scooter has forgotten what it is to be in double digit temperatures and my digits have forgotten what it would feel like to have two of their namesakes get together in the context of a weather discussion.

Even the hardy British folks seem to have stopped grumbling about the weather, probably in the vain hope that they would somehow appease the weather Gods into blessing the place with more moderate weather. No luck on that front either.

Then we have these blessed statisticians, who keep reeling off numbers that say this has been the coldest winter since records began. Since my records began, each winter has been colder than the next, according to these statistics.

It is now bright and sunny outside, but there is no point in going outside, for the Sun in this part of the world only produces light and does not bother  with heating.

The other day, I was watching an advertisement by these infernal litigation lawyers, and I am seriously contemplating if there would be any point in suing the Sun, the Solar System, the UK Government (for the UK being where it is on the planet). The reason for the lawsuit? Discrimination against the people and citizens of this cold and wet country...

Update:

Funny thing happened. As with all other posts of late, this one was taking a healthy snooze in the Drafts folder for the past couple of days. I was mucking about with the weather widget on my phone and out of a whim, I googled the coldest city on Earth and came up with Yakutsuk in Siberian Russia. The current temperature as of the time I posted this is -32 degrees Celcius. Further reading up on this desolate brought up this article. God just dished out some top-of-the-line perspective didn't He?

An eye for an eye at the London Eye...

It was a simple enough plan. I had hired a car for official reasons and since there was a car, the idea was to take the wife and parents on a driving tour of Central London. What a day that turned out to be - and most of that was because of the car.

There's nothing much to report about the car itself, its a Ford Mondeo, what can I say! This post will be monopolised by one of the great enablers of the motor car - the road.

As mankind developed and discovered that the wheel can be used for purposes other than pottery and one wise genius decided to stick a couple of wheels under a tub with a horse up-front, Pandora's box was effectively opened. Modern London was to evolve a thousand years later, when geniuses of the same variety had discovered the joy of creating a contraption that puts one wheel behind another, a.k.a., a bicycle (more on that later).

London as a metropolis goes back to anywhere between 3500 years and 750 years depending on who you're talking to. It is understandable that so long ago, the preferred mode of transport were the human feet or the bicycle. Human feet and bikes as modes of transport have several advantages - they are healthy, environmentally friendly and most importantly, require no more width than 2 feet per "vehicle" so to speak, and is therefore, very space friendly.

Now here lies the problem. Roads, and therefore, houses and buildings were designed around these passages and when you could have a '20 lane' highway with a width of 40 feet, give or take a few feet, you have roads that are, well, narrow in the modern world.

The British in general, and Londoners in particular, seem to be very proud of their rich heritage and so, refuse to bring down old buildings just to widen roads. So all over London you will find roads that put an Amazon forest trail to shame. They are narrow, congested, have absolutely no parking facilities and most importantly, are extremely narrow. Oh, and did I mention the roads are narrow?

The well travelled among you will immediately shoot back with the fact London public transport is second to none and I should have opted for that. I accept your allegations and offer no explanations whatsoever for taking a car into that jungle.

So it was that we were pottering along from one tourist attraction to another. Baker Street came and went with nary a problem, then it was time to head towards London Bridge, I went round and round in search of parking and finally pulled into a mud compound with a big blue P over it and asked the attendant if London Bridge was walkable from that point. The answer he gave me was hardly surprising - he looked at me as if I was as I was completely batty and said, "Its a bit far from 'ere maite" and when a Londoner says something is a 'bit' far, it means is closer to the other end of the planet. London Bridge was vetoed and we proceeded to the next destination, Tower Bridge. This time I was proactive and parked close to the general direction of Tower Bridge and decided to leg it from there. So the troops were unloaded and we set of 'foot-foot' to Tower Bridge. After a brief 15 minute walk, we set sights on Tower Bridge and 5 minutes later we reached the foot of the bridge and it started pouring with rain.

The folks were abandoned under the shelter of a building and my wife and I settled into a quick jog to get back to the car, promptly lost our way and reached the car 20 minutes later. We swung by to pick up the folks only have the sun shining as though that is the only thing it is capable of doing! With each occupant of the car muttering under their breath about the weather, we proceeded towards London Eye, this time with the trusty lady from my SatNav leading the way.

On reaching London Eye, we needed to park somewhere, since I was under the impression that cars were not allowed on the Eye. This started the parking saga. Parking number 1 was closed for the day.

The SatNav lady, who strangely doesn't seem to get daunted with failures, guided me to another car park. This one was the highlight of the day. It supposedly was on the other side of the road with an approach road under the main road. So I took the exit onto the approach road and the moment it curved under the main road, things turned positively negative. The walls on both sides were covered in graffiti. By covered I mean not an inch of space was wasted. New Yorkers might say, no big deal. Agreed, the problem was that the underground artists were still there, spray painting the walls and making sure nobody defaces their masterpieces. There were roughly 10 people there (I am not too sure about the gender mix since they all had long hair, wore hoodies, were pierced and wore jeans around their thighs) and here I was with a gleaming new car - prime graffiti target. I swiftly passed them whispering a silent prayer that they don't corner me and turned the corner into the car park and virtually drove into a stone wall - the car park seemed to be non-existent, the SatNav lady had had her revenge.

Reversing out of this pickle was not an option, the road was curved for starters, then there were the 'artists' to consider and the width was no more than 6 feet. I had to do the impossible. I had to do a u-turn in that space while I was still hidden out of sight of the artists. It took me 10 minutes to do the toing and froing to turn, but I did it and we raced out of there.

P3 was full and we managed to strike gold at P4. I bunged the car into the first available space and much merry making was done at the London Eye, including a cruise down the Thames. We returned to the car after 3 hours and I was hit with a parking charge of 12 quid!

Needless to say, the journey back home was sombre, quick and quiet. The family suggested we take a trip to Westminster the next day since the car was there and I replied with a stare that would make Chuck Norris hide in fear.

Aunt S and a little more food

Prologue

It started with my wife complaining of a headache and tiredness. It came long and strong. Yes, I am talking about advice.

You see, soon after the wedding, we (my wife and I, duh!!) took it upon ourselves to visit every conceivable temple and submit an application, in duplicate, with every God in a 500-kilometre radius, that our life as a couple should be trouble-free, happy and prosperous. Add to this, some “special” prayers to which my wife had committed herself (I shall refrain from any further reference to these prayers on account of what we, in Britain, fondly refer to as “reasons of health and safety”. i.e., I’m going to be a wuss and chicken out of any further comments on the abovementioned special prayers). As a result of this, we ended up spending 15 nights ensuing the wedding in 15 different places and would end up wondering which city we were in each morning.

Such a lot of travel and holiness does take a toll on one and one gets tired.

Chapter I: Don’t pick on your food

We were in Chidambaram with me trying not to open my mouth, lest it be stuffed with food. My newly wedded wife woke up with the mother-of-all-headaches and general fatigue and made the mistake of saying so to her aunt (S), who, bless her, took it upon herself to make sure her child was well fed and watered for the duration of our visit.

Aunt S began with a scathing attack on youngsters of today and how they pick on food, ending up looking listless and weak. And promptly sat us down to eat. Now, I must digress here and remind readers about the kind of food we had been eating in the recent past. You see, in each of these different towns we had visited, we not only had temples in varying quantities, we also had relatives. By now you will be we versed with the equation: marriage + relatives = feasts. To cut a long story short, in the week preceding this incident, we had collectively consumed 60 idlis, 45 dosas, 4 kilos of rice and an bath tub size pool of sambar and rasam. Each. So, when Aunt S mentioned again that we youngsters pick on food, I promptly chocked on idly number 61.

Chapter II: The trip back to Coimbatore

The route from Chidambaram to Coimbatore is a treacherous one. So treacherous, that it even has a few patches of road in between, just to confuse you into believing it is ok to drive faster than 20kmph. Therefore, we decided to take a train from Kumbakonam.

Sometime earlier, I had professed my love of driving to my father-in-law. The morning after I arrived in Chidambaram, I came down from the flat to stare into the business end of a Hyundai I10 car that was to be at my disposal until I caught the train at Kumbakonam.

Many hours of happy driving, avoiding flora and fauna, defensive driving, close brushes with death later, it was time to take a final drive to Kumbakonam, 70km away. By bus, the journey takes a little under 2 hours and by car, it takes around 1.5 hours. I was quite looking forward to the drive.

Aunt S spends the night before our journey mustering up the courage to ask me what I would like to eat during the journey. In the morning, she asks if we want rice, idlis or chapattis on hand. There is no choice between whether we want food or not, just this or that.

Aunt S: “Shall I pack some idlis and curd rice?”

Me: “No, thank you.”

Aunt S: “You are going by car only, you can take some food with you, I’ll pack a little.”

Me: [Blink, blink]

This is something users of cars often encounter – just because they are going by car, carrying mountain loads of luggage is somehow automatically justified! Even if we were only going by car, its still us that has to eat the food, right?

Now, based on the foregoing paragraph, do not, for one moment think that I am in any way thinking about health and weight control while denying food. I merely have my sights set on the food that is sold on the train from the pantry car!

After much convincing and cajoling, we are allowed to get into the car minus food. Aunt S bids emotional farewell to us and looks at me behind the wheel and says, “Drive carefully, do not cross 30kmph.” I do the blink, blink routine again, and reply, “Don’t worry Aunt S, I will drive carefully, but I need to catch that train today and not tomorrow,” and set off….

Epilogue

The journey to Kumbakonam took me a little under 1 hour and I must have been the only bloke in the entire district to have driven with a seatbelt on!