This extreme cold weather reminds me of another really cold spell about 50 years ago.
We were stopping on a roadside camp near Dinnington in South Yorkshire. I don't know the proper name of the road, but all the Gypsies knew it as Tank Lane on account of the fact that it ran past one of those big water storage tanks that stand high above the ground in areas where the water pressure is low.
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Tank Lane was a narrow, 10-cars-a-day B road with a wide flat grass verge that ran along one side for about a quarter of a mile before giving way to fenced fields and woodland. During the sixties, we would stay there for a few weeks almost every winter.
At that time, most families had made the change from horses and waggons to motorised vehicles (mostly lorries) and caravans.
When the weather was cold, there was always a lot of speculation among the men about how low the temperature would drop overnight. Would it freeze, and if so, how hard?
The reality was, everyone was trying to decide whether or not to drain the water from the cooling system of their lorry.
Nowadays, during a cold spell, no one ever gives a thought to the water sitting in their car radiator, they don't have to, because it will have antifreeze added to it to prevent it from freezing.
Why should you worry about it freezing anyway? Well when water freezes, it expands.
Why does it matter if it expands? It doesn't if the frozen liquid has an out, i.e. somewhere to expand to. Have you ever seen milk freeze when it's left on a doorstep? The frozen milk expands by pushing off the cap of the bottle.
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But, if the bottle had a screw on cap the expanding liquid would shatter the bottle. Even if the bottle was made of cast iron, the liquid would shatter it. The force exerted by freezing liquid is incredibly powerful and could easily shatter a lorry engine.
In those days, engines were fitted with their own version of the milk bottle cap. These 'pennies' were press fitted discs of mild steel that were designed to be pushed out by the pressure of of the frozen water, sacrificing themselves for the greater good.
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So the big question was, is it worth going to the trouble of draining the water from the system, (and worse, having to refill it the next morning with water from your precious store) or risk leaving it in to freeze and push your pennies out?
It was a real pain in the arse if your pennies were pushed out, you had to buy new ones and often had to remove the engine to replace them.
Sometimes, if it was cold enough, even the pennies couldn't save you.
Why then, I hear you ask, didn't the Gypsies just put antifreeze in their lorry cooling systems like everyone else? Well, there were two reasons. One, antifreeze was relatively expensive and we were money poor, and two, our decrepit old vehicles suffered so many breakdowns where the coolant was lost that adding antifreeze that would only be needed a couple of times a year during an exceptional cold snap would be considered a waste.
Bloody Hell, what a rambly post this is turning into. I don't even know where I'm going with it either, I'm just in reminiscing mode.
More to follow. (It's my diary so there's no point in protesting)
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