Monday 2 February 2009

In which it snows, and yet life continues.

As anyone who has been watching the BBC will be aware, it snowed today, and as a result, life as we know it ground to a halt. In London, the buses were cancelled, trains didn’t go, even the Tube had problems (which seems odd – I mean, most of it is underground, how snowed in can it be?)

Not being a Londoner, I went to work as usual. There was a little snow, but not enough to really notice. It did start snowing by midmorning, and was snowy enough to cover the pavements – by the time I left work at 5 p.m. we had had between 1.5 and 2 inches.

After having listened to the news, I would not have been surprised to have found myself struggling through avalanches and attacked by glaciers and polar bears, like some latterday Shakleton, but in fact, there was very little excitement.


Driving home was slightly interesting but only due to other drivers - How hard can it be to work out that reduced visibility due to driving snow, together with ice on the road might just mean that it would be a good idea to drive a little more slowly, and leave a little more space to take account of the effect of ice on stopping distances?

From the news coverage one would think we were all going to be trapped by blizzards and reduced to eating our relatives to stay alive. And I'm pretty sure we're not. At least not until tomorrow, maybe even Wednesday.

To be fair, it does seem that London and the South East did have more – about 10 inches in London, but even so, I’m not wholly convinced that this really justifies it being the lead on the news…


Still, it was pretty. There was very little wind so the snow settled not only on the road and rooftops, but also on every branch and leaf. Lovely.

3 comments:

LyleD4D said...

I'm even more gobsmacked by the number of bell-ends that were out there today with foglights on.

After all, it's not like visibility was that bad - and they were still going 80mph+ , as if the foglight was the magic talisman of road safety®™

Mind you, there were also plenty of nongs in 4WD vehicles who couldn't handle even wet roads.

[/rant]

spacedlaw said...

Snow is a big city is rarely seen so Londonners' snow got blown out of proportion. Obviously nobody is ready or prepared for it so mayhem ensues.

Here, even just a dusting reeks of the apocalyps.

Marjorie said...

Yes. I can understand that eveyone gets excited as it the most snow they've had in 20 years, but taking up over half of each news programme seems excessive.