General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

I feel a tale coming on

I once had an Opal Manta, the Mk1 version with round tail lights from the 1970s, and this was in the early 1980s and it had 'normal' profile tyres on it, which gripped in the snow a damn site better than todays low profile tyres, which along with modern cars being lighter now, through the use of plastics in the construction of vehicles, and my Opal Manta was rear wheel drive, and when it snowed I would go out and have some fun in it, sliding around, I would go up to Winter Hill, and I could make that car do anything in snow, but one very snowy night I decided to travel from Westhoughton to Pemberton via Aspull, so off I pops up Church Street and then left on to the A6 and there wasn't a car in sight, the snow was so deep that it covered the pavement and road, so you could not tell where the kerb was, and the journey to the junction with Dicconson Lane was long a path of pure virgin snow, and the front panel on the car below the front bumper, I don't what it is called but that was streamlined in shape, rather than the built in spoiler shape they are now, and as I drove along through the snow, I thought that if the car gets stuck, I will just reverse back along my tyre tracks, and at a point near to where the junction with the Wingates Industrial Estate is now, it wasn't there back then, the road emerged from the houses and it is then exposed to the elements, and the snow had been drifting across the road, and as the snow became deeper I could hear the front panel starting to catch the snow, but because of it's shape it was riding over the snow, so I put me foot down has much as I could, without spinning the back wheels, and the car picked up some speed and in the rear view mirror has well as the tyre tracks, I could also make out that the underside of the car was scraping along the snow, and you have to remember that when there is snow on the ground, street lamps light up everything better, so as I approached Dicconson Lane at probably a silly sort of speed, I noted a police range rover, with flashing blue lights, and they were directing traffic from the Blackrod direction, up Dicconson Lane, they were parked side on to the A6 and they had closed the A6 and the road coming from the motorway roundabouts had been snow ploughed, going into Dicconson Lane, which had left a big bank of snow across the road, to which at I was going to stop and be stuck, so as the line from the Convoy song said "I crashed the gate doing 98" I hit this snow bank, there being no traffic coming towards me, and smashed through it, with snow flying everywhere, and I spun to a stop and these two policemen were shouting at me, and they were covered in this snow I had just scattered everywhere.

One of the policeman walked over and as he was sarcastically brushing
snow off his shoulders, he started having a moan at me, with a logical question, to which I gave him a logical answer "why did you just do that" answer "so I didn't get stuck on the other side of that snow bank" "the road is closed" was the answer I got "well I didn't know" I replied, so I explained where I had come from, to which he said "ooh I had forgot about Church Street, so they must have shut the A6 at the Bolton Road junction not realising traffic could get through on to it at Church Street and there is also a road over to Lostock on the other side of the A6, as this was happening a car drove along the A6 from the Blackrod side and carried on through the gap I had just made in the snow bank, and then spun round and was stopped a few feet away from the police vehicle, pointing at the police vehicle, with the front wheels spinning around with the engine revving, a woman was driving it and both policeman ran over shouting at beckoning her to get her foot off the accelerator.

Whilst this was happening I quietly put the car in gear and drove off up Dicconson Lane, because they hadn't told me to wait there