Saturday 5th December 2009 - Signs of the Times

          I have breakfast in the diner across the road.  As I look out the window to check the weather, I see two police cars, abreast, coming slowly round the ring road.  There is fire truck with all its lights blazing behind, and police cars racing past to the next junction, as motorcycle police do in Europe.  I think at first it must be some terrible disaster, but then I see, coming gradually around the bend, a processsion of fire trucks of all sizes and colours.

          When I get outside, the whole procession is wailing its sirens and sounding-off those wonderful tug-boat foghorns that American fire trucks use.  Nobody in the diner knew what it was about, but it was clearly some Christmas mission

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because there in the middle, in a very venerable-looking fire truck, was my first sight of Santa.  There were trucks of all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours, so I guess it was all the townships around the ring road, as well as the city.

 

          I spent a fair amount of time arranging my Delaware landing.  I have found that getting the addresses of the big motel chains gets me to the places where motels 'flock', so I can do a price comparison before I get there, and a price-and-facilities comparison with the non-chains when I arrive.

          I've also started to develop another story.  I described an outline of it to someone in the place where it's set, and discovered, to my surprise, that another character popped-up unbidden.  So it's just possible that some unfortunate souls may get strange unwanted emails from me just to see if it helps with a story: you have been warned.

 

          Later that night, I watched a bit of football being played in driving snow.  The players and officials were clearly having a miserable time.  It was being played in Connecticutt, but the visiting team was from south Florida.  Their weather miseries must have been compounded by losing narrowly to a field goal in the final second of the game.