Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

Slightly belated, but doesn't the snow make everything look fantastic! Check out the view from our study window (and yes, we did make the snowman. Before going to work. At 8 am. That's what I call dedication).

Oxford's beautiful in the snow, but it's amazing how it slows one down. I seem unable to walk down the road without stopping to build mini-snowmen (all of whom had melted by the time I returned home from work). And it brings out the child in all of us - well, in me anyway. There's something peculiarly satisfying about being the first person to leave footprints in the pristine whiteness. It's a human thing.

I think I'm done on being profound for the moment. Have fun, all!

You wait for ages, and then two turn up at once...

There can be few frustrations in life to compete with it. It's enough to make grown men burst into tears and to make small children yell abuse at those around them. Or should that be the other way around?

I refer, of course, to that phenomenon known as Waiting For Buses. Now, I'm not exactly a true petrol-head, and if you were to ask me which I'd rather have out of the Vauxhall Something TDi or the Peugeot SomethingElse LX, I really couldn't tell you. I could, of course, express a preference between, say, a brand new Aston Martin DB-9 and my seven year-old Skoda Felicia. However hard we owners of such vehicles protest that, despite years of mocking, the Skoda is now a serious option as a car (rather than as a car-shaped lump of metal sitting on the drive), how the input of VW's engineering expertise has turned a farce into one of the best value for money cars out there, and how in recent years they've ranked highly in terms of reliability, improved in terms of style, and retained their low insurance group, we still find ourselves longing for slightly more than 47 bhp. It's not that it's insufficient for anything in particular, it's just that having, say, 325 bhp might be somewhat more fun.

However, I do know that, when faced with the choice between getting on a bus and getting into a car, I'd far rather take the car. I'd far rather take a bike, to be quite honest. I think it's something about public transport, and I've come to the conclusion that it's, well, the public. Now, don't get me wrong. In some places (preferably far away) buses may serve some useful purpose. They may be cheap, and cost less than the car (it's a novel idea, I know). They may not be smelly, and may be driven by someone who knows which side of the road the rest of the population will be on. They may stop and wait for you when you're three meters down the road in a thunderstorm, and they may not be populated by teenagers whose IQs are, even at their tender ages, outweighed by their shoe sizes. In this Utopia, such buses may exist. All I know is that it's not here.

But surely one of the cruelest torments about buses is the invention known as the timetable. Timetables are devices which serve two purposes. They force one to rush manically to reach the bus stop before the time at which the bus is due, and then force one to wait in ever increasing despondency as the minutes tick past after this time until the bus actually does turn up.

However, one thing about buses that you can rely upon is their ability to arrive in pairs. Like adolescent girls, they seem unwilling to travel alone, and prefer instead the companionship of another bus. And, of course, to prevent loneliness, both buses will be "serving" (note the irony) the same route.

So this is why buses are like spiders. Particularly three-inch wide black spiders with horribly hairy, well, things (I don't know - antennae?). I've lived in my flat for a year now, and despite having to face many creepy-crawlies of varying species, I've managed to stear clear of the arachnids. Until yesterday, when in the morning there was one in the bath, followed by, in the evening, one in the corner of my room.

Why? Don't they have timetables?

It's simply H2O...

"Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink..."

So cries the Ancient Mariner (possibly... I never was any good at English: science is more my thing). And it's a cry that's being echoed across the wild, and currently parched, plains of Oxford after a building contractor accidently drove a crane through the mains water pipe into my building. Or something. Given this is Britain, and it's currently summertime, it could be that we have the wrong sort of water. Whatever.

For the point is, dear readers, that we have no water. None to drink, none to use in the bathrooms, and none for our experiments. Which is how I come to be writing this, as I wait for my water circulator (a device that, well, circulates water) to slowly warm up from 2 to 25 degrees centigrade. I would normally simply empty out a few litres of cold water and replace them with a similar volume of hot. Unable to do this, I could be here a while.

Which got me thinking just how much water we must use. Apparently the daily volume consumed by every single person in the UK is, on average, 160 litres: that's really rather a lot.

So I propose a solution to this problem, and the current climate-change-influenced shortages we're either currently experiencing, or which in the near future are guaranteed to turn England's green and pleasant land into something resembling the Sahara desert (although possibly without the camals). To paraphrase from that attributed to Marie Antoinette*, "Let them drink wine."

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* As mentioned, I'm not an English student and, unsurprisingly, one would be correct in assuming that, despite a decent grade at GCSE, I'm not much of a historian either. Consequently, I had to Google to discover who made this infamous comment. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find out (from the font of all knowledge that is Yahoo!) that in all likelihood, Ms. Antoinette was in fact completely innocent of this heinous crime, a far more likely culprit being French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in early 1766! The things you learn when you start wasting time...