To blog or not to blog

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

If a UFO arrived in the skies above the United Kingdom last week the small green fluffy creatures from Alpha Centauri would be forgiven for thinking that we had never seen snow in our country before. It always amazes me how everything grinds to a frozen standstill and we fail completely to cope with what is, after all, an annual occurrence. Supermarket shelves are stripped bare, like an eviscerated carcass in a post-apocalyptic locust attack; road salt and grit pass hands with a black market value greater than cocaine; emergency services are stretched to their limits by calls to attend idiot drivers who have spun off the road having driven at speeds far too fast for the conditions. Accident and Emergency wards are bursting at the seams with ice-related fractures, sprains, broken hips and dislocated shoulders. I bet 90% of the injuries sustained were on people who didn’t really need to go out in the snow anyway. Trains get stranded in the Chanel Tunnel and Gordon Brown sweeps in, superhero cape aflutter, to coordinate Britain’s grit reserves. One assumes the bat-cave war bunker under Downing Street has sprung back to life and Mr Brown is seen saving the country from his twat-mobile. Schools are closed for health and safety reasons – presumably to ensure that the kids don’t slip on the ice. These are the same kids who are then left unsupervised to run amok, throwing snowballs at motorists or careering down hillsides on plastic bags to brain themselves on the brick wall at the bottom.

Maybe I am uncharitable but I have little sympathy for the people who put themselves forward for the Darwin Awards, by venturing out on frozen lakes and rivers. Clearly they fell into our gene pool by mistake too.

Quick tip: if anyone ever wants to invade Britain, do it when we have a light covering of snow, you will find us completely paralysed and at your mercy.

Our friendly Aliens must be pissing themselves as they watch us panic and thrash around, when our neighbours in Scandinavia are no doubt equally bemused by our inability to cope, as they simply lock on their snow tyres and throw another copy of Mamma Mia on the sauna fire.

Every year we are dealt the same rhetoric: we don’t get these conditions frequently enough for it to be financially viable to change our infrastructure and planning contingencies. So every year we are left with a metaphorical trousers round our ankles while our government has pissing competitions in the snow.

But our leaders want to have their iced cake and eat it too. On one hand we are told that it would not be economically viable to better prepare for these ‘freak’ annual conditions, but in the same breath they protest the billions of pounds lost to the economy caused by the snow. (That is, of course, fuzzy mathematics. Yes, some industries will have suffered due to lost production or revenue, but I suspect that just as many will have gained – I bet the AA has seen record uptake, the power companies will be rubbing their hands with glee and whilst bin men may not have been collecting rubbish, I bet they have been gainfully employed by councils for clearing roads. Panel-bashers and heating engineers will be quid’s in. If we haven’t bought bread, we HAVE bought de-icer. If people have been eating tinned or frozen food this week, they will replace those supplies next week. I expect the real costs to Britain.com will soon be smoothed out again.) There is much we could do to prepare for such conditions, which climatologists tell us will increase. In a world of advanced telecommunications, home computers and web-casts there are many businesses which could operate adequately with their employees working from home. We are told to not clear our paths for fear of prosecution if someone believes a driveway to be ice-free but slips on the patch we missed – maybe we need to look at more appropriate legislation which encourages people to clear snow.  Maybe if school catchment areas were limited to walking distance, for teachers and pupils, then there would be less need for closures in all but the most rural areas. I remember that if it snowed during my childhood we just took boots and a change of shoes, but still walked to school. We had snowmen competitions on the playing field, even if there were only a few teachers about. And that was before the mothers all had 4x4s and kids could raise a claim for negligence if they grazed their knee.  If we ran out of bread, there was always yeast and flour in the cupboard. Mother always had a couple of pints of milk in the freezer and the skills to cook up a fortnight’s worth of decent meals from the contents of her pantry.

In Germany there is a requirement for every household to clear the pavements outside their property and keep it clear of ice and snow during daylight hours. In fact, in many areas of Europe there is a legal requirement to fit winter tyres during the coldest months. People buy anti-slip pads for their shoes and wear a few more layers.

We don’t even require British drivers to undertake skid-pan tests experience before they are allowed to drive, so most people have no idea how to react when roads are icy. I was trained by the Cumbria Police Driving School and to gain my licence I had a full afternoon on a skid-pan, and had to show two things: firstly, that I could recover from a skid and secondly (more importantly) that I could drive at a speed and in a way that minimised the chance of skidding in the first place. There is no requirement to demonstrate these skills to get a UK licence, nor is anyone taught and tested on motorway driving, or how to deal with poor visibility. Is it any wonder that Mr Muppet ends up shunted into a ditch at the first sign of a frost?

It doesn’t help that our weather forecasts are so inaccurate. I appreciate that it is a very complex field, with conditions changing all the time, but if any other industry produced such poor results and offered such limp excuses, then they shouldn’t be paid their massive annual bonuses. Maybe bankers freelance as meteorologists, and use the same bit of seaweed to predict financial storms as they do approaching weather systems.  Arthur C Clarke famously said that any technology sufficiently advance is indistinguishable from magic. I wonder if the Met Office has not misinterpreted that as ‘if your technology is pants, bamboozle them with hocus-pocus’. In their defence, the Met Office do say “we can never create a perfect forecast system because we can never observe every detail of the atmosphere’s initial state. Tiny errors in the initial state will be amplified, so there is always a limit to how far ahead we can predict any detail.” So a ‘Barbeque Summer’ is rained off and nobody seems to have seen this cold spell coming. It seems that even short-term forecasts are as much guess work as science and just a few days ago we were battening the hatches ahead of more record-breaking low temperatures due to continue to the end of the month, and yet today it is a positively balmy 2 degrees above freezing and the ice is all but gone. If when working on IT contracts I had put together an estimate that was so far off track, I’d have been sacked on the spot. No wonder people still take bets on white Christmases – if it were anything other than guess-work, Ladbrokes would not take the odds.

But it is not all doom and gloom. We had a wonderful hour out on Saturday, taking photos in the snow. I stumble along as best I can and we can’t go far because I still can’t walk any distance. But the photos are all from just a few hundred yards away from our home and it always amazes me that this area is so rural when it is in fact in the middle of a major city.  Of course, blue skies and crisp white snow makes it easy to take a decent photo.