Under the sun and the snow

The email and the phone would not stop last night. If anything was going to happen in family life, at work, in our holiday business or in athletics last night seemed to be the time. Everything under the sun.

Not that there has been much sun lately. My issues melt quickly unlike the snow that so many people in the Island have been under.

At the best of times, city folk would struggle to understand what it is like to be without electricity and food supplies in dreadfully cold conditions. But even as someone who spent much of their childhood beneath the mountains at Kirk Michael from which the south east winds would blow the snow, I'm struggling to comprehend just how bad it is for the people in the country right now.

When you read of farmers loosing hundreds of sheep you wonder how any business person, for that it what farmers are, can manage to loose such a big percentage of their assets. And its shocking to think of the sheep  perishing in that way.

I recall what it was like on the road between Bishopscourt and Kirk Michael when on a bad day you could barely ride a bike downhill into the wind. In my adult life, whenever someone has said there has been a lot of snow I have produced the old photos and told the stories of how much worse it was in the old days so its a shock to say I can't remember it is as bad as it is now in Cronk-y-Voddy and Baldwin etc.

How many people can imagine being five days without electricity? My mother-in-law was brought up on Lambfell at Cronk-y-Voddy and she still gets the "skeet" from up that way. She told us about the concerns for the lady who needed 24 hours a day care who couldn't get help.

The lady was rescued by helicopter yesterday. Imagine the surprise to find the pilot is Prince William, It really was a day for everything under the sun. And for escaping from under the snow.

Lets hope that more people have their lives back to normal today.