Let it snow

People in the UK seem to go absolutely gaga for a bit of snow, it’s quite incredible. Driving down the street as the first flakes fell on Sunday evening people were emerging from their homes and standing on the pavements with their faces to the sky and mouths hanging open. Really, you don’t know where that stuff has been.

And as the population loses its mind the same happens to our infrastructure. The roads and the trains seem to be taken by surprise every time, as if checking the weather forecast is for wimps. Given the regularity with which winter happens each year, on a broadly similar timetable, what’s most surprising is that we can still be surprised.

It all makes you worry about what would happen were something genuinely unexpected to happen. Civilisation is suspended on such a fine thread, it really wouldn’t take a great deal for the whole thing to come crashing down. A run on flour at the supermarket, for instance.

It’s all doubly ironic – especially in these days of weaponised nostalgia – that the country which prides itself on its indomitable Blitz spirit can be brought to its knees by 5cm snow drifts. It always reminds me of that mythical excuse someone apparently once sent to their insurer, that a tree just came out of nowhere. Snow? We couldn’t see anything, our view was impeded by the weather.

What’s most annoying about the trains being cancelled – a combination of weather and strikes – is that I was hoping to be in the office for no other reason than to have someone else pay to warm me. On the plus side the coffee is better at home. Got to look on the bright side and all that.