Snow Business

A miracle occurred over Christmas. Not bad, considering I’m an atheist. You see, two days before Christmas Day, it snowed where I live. And it stayed on the ground until Christmas Day. This was the first White Christmas I’d ever had. The bookmakers William Hill only actually pay out if it snows on Christmas Day, but whatever, don’t take it away from me. Because normally, I would be hard pressed to see what all the fuss is about. But not with snow. Just like Doctor Who, snow manages to bypass the cynical, grown up part of my brain and is for me, guiltlessly enjoyable. As a child, there was nothing better than waking up and seeing that ethereal pearlescent light shine through translucent bedroom curtains, which let me know that there was snow on the ground without even looking outside the window. Somehow, you just knew. Which was nothing compared to the joy of surveying the virgin snow, which could be rolled into snowmen, scooped into snowballs or simply just walked across, whilst one relished that hollow crunch of snow under welly boot. Lovely, and all during the Christmas holidays. Perfect.

But it wasn’t perfect, because not everybody sees it this way. In the lead up to the forecasted snowfall, quite a few of the newspapers might have well as simply printed a picture of a car stuck in 4 feet of snow accompanied by the headline PANIC!!!, the big black capitals a striking contrast to the wintry scene below. As fate would have it, I wasn’t at home at the time but out in Malvern – which is a little town about three miles from where I live, famous for mineral water and hills and not much else. In the alternate sane Britain, the other drivers would have just calmly driven in high gears at sensibly safe speeds. Easy. No, instead some people decided instead to PANIC!!! and it was at a stand still. I counted five abandoned cars. Malvern was like a low budget remake of The Day After Tomorrow. I should probably mention that this was in two centimeters of snow. That’s less than an inch. And I know that five abandoned cars doesn’t sound like a lot, but unlike a few centimeters of snow, a few cars left on the roads actually does block them pretty comprehensively. Instead of the usual route home, I was forced to do a hasty three point turn when this couple, a few cars in front of mine left their vehicle. They did so with that dumb animal panic in their eyes, the sort you see when a horse bolts its stable in a thunderstorm. But the difference is that when you’re a horse, its OK to be irrationally scared by the weather, because you’re horse.

In Berkshire, where it snowed (admittedly, slightly more heavily) a few days earlier, the police were removing abandoned cars and charging their owners to get them back, which at the time sounded really unfair. Like, the facist cops are totally out of order and stuff, yeah? By God did I now empathize with them. Whatever happened to that Open-as-Usual, Blitz Spirit which saw us plucky Brits cheerfully shrug our shoulders and carry on. I’m not going to say ‘What we need is another war’, partly because we have one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and a third would just look greedy, and partly because only men start wars and men are crap at multitasking so it probably wouldn’t work out anyway. But part of it definitely is a national pride thing. A few centimeters of snow in Britain saw scores of trains cancelled. But they manage in other countries in far worse conditions. In Norway, they send out men with flame throwers to make sure that the points don’t freeze up on the railway, on account of the sub artic conditions that hammer the transport system for months at a time. Sure, conditions are tough but they manage, as they do in other cold climes like Canada or Russia. So come on people of Britain, get a grip. I hate saying that, because I’m aware that I sound like a whinging Daily Mail columnist complaining about how this country has gone to the dogs, what with them gay asylum seekers pushing up house prices and lowering our moral standards. But when instead of being needlessly stuck in a car when I could be at home enjoying a snowy Christmas, then my idiot tolerance plummets. I eventually made it home, after an hour and a half of U-turns and going the long way round. The next day, on Christmas Eve, I went sledging and all was right with the world.