First snows of the winter commute

Snow in Edinburgh this morning, which added a different and slightly eerie dimension to my ride into work along the Union Canal.

For those of you who don't know it, the canal has something of a dual personality (perhaps Jekyll and Hyde would be a more apposite reference) at the best of times. It runs from the centre of Edinburgh out to at least Falkirk (though I've never been that far) and, as I might have mentioned before, being artificial and created by Scots engineers it runs along the tops of ridges and over viaducts and suchlike. At the city centre end, it can be quite beautiful, lit with little cats eyes on the side of the path and winding past playing fields and big old houses. It's flat, quiet and safely away from cars and buses.

The Mr Hyde quality emerges in narrow cobbled strips where it runs under bridges, and chicanes created by pairs of iron gates that are poorly illuminated, painted black and only sparsely decorated with reflective material. In the dark, you can only tell where they are by the brutal speed bumps either side of them (or in one case, a double set of speed bumps on one side only. Did someone forget to put the gate in the right place?). Edinburgh is also, it seems, home to many people who like nothing more than walking on a narrow path shared with cyclists in near-darkness wearing drab clothes. I haven't hit one. Yet.

Further along, there's an old viaduct with a long strip of especially narrow and slippery cobbles, after which the lighting runs out for several hundred metres. The first time I encountered this stretch, armed only with a totally inadequate urban front light (for "being seen" rather than "seeing"), was the closest I have come to identifying with Luke Skywalker [1], [2].

Anyway, today the snow had gently settled on the path without having time to thaw and refreeze. It was benign to cycle on (though I still trod gingerly over the viaduct), and reduced sound to the muffled hiss of wheels through soft snow. Alongside, the canal itself had frozen over for the full length of my ride and gained its own covering of snow (leading to the unusual sight of swans' takeoff and landing tracks preserved on the surface of the canal). Overhead, the snow clouds reflected a soft grey glow in the early light.

It was like riding through a gentle dream that constantly threatened to head off into David Lynch territory, but never quite did. That can wait for when the bottom layer of snow's had time to refreeze into a slick sheet of black ice...

[1] "How can I ride it when I can't even see it?" "Use the force, Luke"
[2] Lightsabres are kind of cool, but give me a good blaster anyday.