So, last night five of us put on our hiking boots or wellies and trogged off to 'Thing in a Pub.'  As we munched our butties and supped our coke/wine/guiness/lager we talked over various pastoral things, the fact that the bat-inspector has been unable to come put because of snow (holy cow, Robin, it's the wrong kind of snow - the bat mobile is stranded...(or words to that effect anyway)) and then moved on the the nonsensical legend of how Dibley got its name.  This last one was interesting as someone then asked how we could be confident of Biblical reliability - they said OT but I added NT - the transition from oral tradition to written record, the challenges of translation and so on.  I couldn't say it was a deep discussion but it was a start.  So, we noted the Elhoist and Yahwist strands in the early part of Genesis (which creation story is "right"?!  Look at Genesis 1 and 2 for anyone who's never compared), the parenthesis at the start of John 8 (woman caught in adultery) the various endings of Mark and so on.  One person seemed mildly perturbed that I have a book of gnostic scriptures on my shelf, others were fascinated by the idea of (essentially) redaction.  Good fun!

It is intriguing to see how we have moved and changed as a group of people, and how these sitting around food/drink initiatives somehow free us to talk more openly and honestly about faith issues as compared with the twee right-answers of a house group of Bible study.  I think we must have made an odd sight sitting there in our boots and discussing elementary biblical studies, but it was well worth it.

... do my forty- and fifty-somethings see a few flakes of snow and start cancelling everything days ahead when my sixty-, seventy-, eighty-, ninety- and even hundred-and-somethings wrap up, put on their boots and get on with it? When did we get so nesh?

More snow this morning - hurray!  I blame it on being born in the 1962/63 winter - the first five months of my life snow was normality.  There's a wonderful post here which expresses delight in the snow and raises sensible questions about cost/benefit of changing our infrastructure to cope with 5E-2 return frequency extreme events.  It doesn't use that language, Maggi is a musician not a risk assessor, but she's right I suspect - the sums probably don't stack up.

In the days when I did risk assessment sums for a living we used the Health & Safety Executive guidelines for 'cost-benefit analysis' on potential risk reduction measures.  The basic rule of thumb is obviously that the financial equivalent of the benefit needs to exceed the cost of the change.  As I recall it (and it's now ten years since I last did such an exercise) a risk reduction modification would only be required by the statutary bodies if the benefit was ten times the cost.  If the cost exceeded the benefit, and if the risk was already ALARP or broadly accpetable (both jargon for degrees of liveable with) then the modification would not be made, even though it would reduce risk.

I have no idea what the cost of snow ploughs, gritters and grit would be, I have no idea what the financial-equivalent of lost working days, road accidents, falls and fractures might be.  But maybe it is our attitude not our infra-structure we need to be changing?

As for me, I may venture out to see one or two house-bound folk, admire the lovely views across my garden, sup hot chocolate, possibly create some snow-folk (how PC is that!) and enjoy the relative quiet of an enforced slow week.

Several people have posted on the atheist bus slogan generator which is good fun to play around with.  For some of the best ones I've seen follow the links here here here and here

For what it's worth, and it's not remotely funny, here's one I generated this afternoon when I got back from lunch club.  We load up to 50 wrinklies onto a coach and bundle a few more into cars and have lots of fun - even if I do sometimes wonder why it took me four years of theology to train to do it.  The first line is a kind of slogan I've used for our church a fair bit in the last five years, the second reflects lunch club life.

On a journey with God

Climb aboard and join the fun

The snow is going here - at least on the main roads, my street still bears more than a passing resemblance to a toboggan run - but once darkness falls the residual slush and water will turn to ice.  Almost all the schools have been closed today and lots of evening meetings have been cancelled.  Tomorrow is Lunch Club day - and the phone calls today have been along the lines of 'you won't cancel will you?'

I suspect that for many of our members, especially the more frail among them, this is an outing to which they look forward all month and who are probably quite stir crazy having been cooped up for a few days.  We'll have to be extra careful - really don't want any broken bones - but barring blizzards or pestilence we'll be there.

Interesting!