What the Fog?

I really don’t like fog. I guess I’ve known this for quite a while now, but I was reminded of it again today when I had to drive in, well in the fog.

Driving in the fog is quite possibly the trickiest piece of driving a person ever has to experience, in fact I’m beginning to think that a person shouldn’t even be given their licence until they have shown that they understand the rules of driving in fog.

Simple things. Like turning on your lights for instance.

Today on my relatively short drive I met at least five drivers who didn’t have their lights on whilst driving in fog.

I say ‘at least’ because there might well have been more – it’s just that, well perhaps I didn’t see them in the fog because they didn’t have their lights on.

This really is the number one rule for driving in fog, and yet amazingly there are eejits out there who choose to ignore it.

On the other hand I’m beginning to wonder if they had just switched on the lights but were using those energy saving bulbs?

Nope, I’m pretty sure that these people just don’t switch their lights on while driving in the fog and that is pretty damn annoying.

Once I even pulled in at a shop behind a person who had been driving with no lights on in the fog and, because I knew them, asked them why they hadn’t switched their lights on.

I was astounded when the person in question told me that they didn’t put their lights on because they could see perfectly well in the fog.

"Of course you bloody could," I said (although not aloud because this person was quite big and bad tempered) "that’s because everybody else has their lights on – but nobody can see you!"

Fog in itself though is quite pointless really when you think about.

I’m not sure how many people have actually thought about fog, but if you’ve bothered to read this, take a few seconds and think about fog.

You see what I mean? Pointless isn’t it!

I mean rain I can understand. Water from rivers and lakes evaporates and forms into clouds and when they get a certain temperature the water falls again back to earth in wee drops.

That’s a kinda simplified version but we all know rain. We might hate it, but we know it.

And then there’s ice and snow and we all kinda understand them. In fact, we get that if it rains a lot there might be flooding and there could even be signs on the roads to say so.

We get that in some places there are signs that say a road is liable to frost, or that if it freezes or snows the gritters and slowploughs come out to get the roads passable again. (This may or may not happen in the place where you live – but honestly there are places where it does!)

But fog. Dammit you can’t even put a sign up to say that the road is liable to fog cos you wouldn’t see it. This, by the way, is a good thing though.

I mean could you imagine how many dumbasses there would be out there trying to say it wasn’t their fault they didn’t have their lights on because there was no sign up saying there was fog ahead.

And you can’t even do cool stuff with fog. I mean in the rain you can splash in the puddles or whatever.

You can go siding on the ice on a plastic 10-10-20 fertiliser bag or an old biscuit tin lid (or if you are really fancy on a sleigh) and with snow you can make snowmen and have snowball fights and make snow angels.

You can’t make a fog man though. And even though it’s cold and wet you can’t slide or splash in the fog.

All in all it’s a pretty useless piece of weather, except perhaps to cause major inconvenience and hassle to motorists.

Even the explanations I found on google didn’t seem to lend any good reason whatsoever to fog as an actual weather event so I decided to e.mail met eireann to see if they could help.

They sent me a long and scientific reason why we get fog and told me to read it very carefully.

Apparently if I did so, it would all eventually become clear…