I arrived home late yesterday afternoon just in time for dinner and a much needed quiet night in infront of the tely. I also had myself a nice early night and a long lie to catch up on my sleep and prepare for what I was planning on being a busy day of last minute christmas shopping, but little did I know I would be spending my day shoveling snow at the front of my housing estate and helping the poor neighbours stuck in the snow!
I had left the house with mum and driven what usually would only be a 5 minute journey to the motorway, taking us 40 minutes and finally decided we weren't going to get very far so turned around and headed back home. I live in a estate full of hills, and when the snow hits monklands estate it hits bad!! There's no getting anywhere and when you are stuck you're stuck! Driving back into the estate, struggling up the hill in 2nd gear i see my neighbour out directing traffic from his broken down and slightly dented car. We finally got to the house and decided we should get a couple of shovels from the garage and go down to the bottom of the estate and help the Hannah's move their car, so set off in my wellies big anorak on and my shovel and phoned my friend saying I think we are needed at the front of the estate lots of broken down cars.
Within 5 minutes the word seemed to have spread across the whole estate and the people coming in and out must have seen what had happened, and as I was shoveling away at the road making a path for all the cars I brought my head up to see almost 20 of my neighbours doing the exact same thing. Talk about community spirit?! Everyone was just mucking in together, shoveling away and getting behind and pushing the cars struggling to make it up the hill.
I have always lived on the same street in Airdrie, a small town just outside Glasgow, and everyone knows everyone in the estate and you know all the kids that come round the doors to trick or treat, and all the kids chasing the santa sledge as it comes up the street, blasting its music and bringing all out into the cold. But I have never noticed such a spirit amongst all the people out to help one another when in need, and it really made me stop and think about how living in such a small nit community is great and how much I love it. Walking around the estate at night, going for the paper's on a sunday morning or even just out washing your car people walk past and stop ask how your doing, especially when they see I am only home from Dundee for the weekend.
Another great thing about growing up in a place like this is my friends, we have known each other our whole life's, and no matter how far away we are during the year at uni we all come home at christmas and its like we have never left and today was the perfect example, because after shoveling out the cars we went back to our houses grabbed our sledges and hit the park. The biggest kids in the estate! All of us if not already 20, then not far off it.
After being abused in the park by all the small children hitting us with snowballs and getting in our way we decided to call it a day, plus sledging takes alot more out of you than i remembered, but now sitting in my nice warm bedroom in Airdrie I have just received a text from my friend 8:45pm on a saturday evening for round 2 of sledging so Im off to grab my hat and my wellies and hit the slopes!!!
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