More travel tales

I forgot to mention. The drive home from Lairg is about 1 1/2 hours - you can do it in an hour if you really want to arrive with lambs stuck to yer bumpers - but on Wednesday I drove home from Lairg and encountered 4 cars. Where else in the UK can you drive for that long and encounter so few cars?

Today we're going to Wick for straw and oats and shops. I watched the weather last night night and went to bed resigned to constant rain all day. As it is I've woken to glorious sunshine. Of course it may not last but it's a nice start and a stark example of how the weather people so often get our weather very very wrong.

Meanwhile the met office have released their local climate projections for the next 100 years - which gave rise to the headline in the Beeb last night "London as hot as Bagdad" - you can find the maps and stuff here - worth a look but it's difficult to interpret - there's a lot of stuff on this website I've not yet looked at though. Anyway, whichever way you look at it things are changing - and very fast - and up here the most obvious threat is winter flooding with communities being cut off for days or weeks on end (because there's so few roads and a lack of alternative routes when one road gets washed away yer stuffed). Highland Council is doing what it can to plan for these things already - cos they've had quite a few instances of roads being washed away in the last few years - and a couple of years ago the A9 was washed away and in that one event the Council used up all their spare bridges.

Eh? Yes really - Highland Council keeps a stash of spare bridges for emergency use. One example of why climate change will hit poorer countries far harder than it'll hit us. But some of those projections are extreme - and not beyond the realms of possibility. And if the progress of past projections is anything to go by, in a couple of years time it will be predicted that the more extreme scenarios are more likely than they are currently estimated to be.

Planners - that's everyone from Councils to small businesses - are being urged by Government to start factoring in these projections in their risk analysis and contingency planning. No one is expected to get it right - but at least start considering it now and try to have some contingencies in place. A tough call without a doubt. It may be the Government realises that everyone needs to start thinking about these things - it may be that Government hasn't got a f*cking clue what to do and are so are passing the buck.