December 18, 2009
Snow Use Grumbling
It’s all gone very festive outside Rob Towers. There is snow on the ground. Not a huge amount it has to be said – but certainly the white, scenic carpet so beloved by Christmas card designers. This morning I had the dubious pleasure of accompanying my dog across some fields that were an unblemished white landscape.
Then the illusion was shattered when I turned on breakfast television to be informed that England was now on something approaching a war footing. There was a rather chilly looking girl somewhere near a place called Royston where a car was parked on the side of the road. It had been abandoned apparently because of the harsh conditions. A similar story was brought to us live from Heathrow, where if we could ignore the traffic going about its business on the A4 – and the unceasing flow of planes taking off… well there might be a problem if your flight started at Luton.
It was a similar story of mass mayhem on the local news. The last day of the school term was now yesterday – because all the local schools were apparently closed for the day. The old chestnut of how does the bloke who drives the snowplough get to drive the snowplough was re-written by the stoic camera crews of Look East, who had not just got there – they filmed the aforementioned gritters and snow ploughs setting off through a couple of inches of snow.
All of which got me wondering. When exactly did a sprinkling of snow become such a problem? First World War veterans may longer be with us, but every pub has its survivor of the great freeze of the early 60’s when life carried on despite snow and frost being with us for months on end.
Just think, if the great freeze of nine sixty whatever it was happened now, not only would it all be the fault of global warming. The entire country would starve to death, education would cease – and our cars would fall apart from lack of use.
So life went on despite huge volumes of snow in the 1960’s. But the country now ceases to function if any snow falls at all. When? Why? Maybe it is all part of 21st century life. Towards the end of the 1990’s, I distinctly remember being chucked off a broken down train in the 1990s at Bishops Stortford because the train had broken down due to ‘the wrong sort of snow’. I can’t imagine Victorian steam trains had such a technological problem.
Maybe technology is to blame. In an era when people can’t exist without useless gizmos with things called ‘apps’ a little bit of adverse weather is well, just a bit too adverse to be bothered with. My own cynical theory is that this is why people nowadays are so concerned with global warming. They like a gizmo to make things faster, easier, better. And as the weather refuses to be controlled or even occasionally play ball – then it is best to pretend the world will end – unless we do something (or anything). As is that is going to make the slightest bit of difference.
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