Tag Archive for 'england'

So, we’ve had a bit of weather here. There is actually, as we speak, a layer of snow in my garden that has been there for three days. Three days! This is unheard of! Apparently it’s the worst snowfall in Britain in eighteen years. Predictably, the entire country has flown into a panic. On the first day of snow, there were no buses running in London. None. Not one single bus could navigate the treacherous Iditarod of London streets under an inch of snow. Schools were closed; half the country didn’t bother showing up for work; cars were abandoned in their thousands.

And the news coverage has been relentless. You’d think aliens had landed, or that we were under nuclear attack, or that we were under attack by nuclear aliens, rather than being, as we are, moderately inconvenienced by some unseasonably inclement weather. The up-to-the-minute reporting hasn’t stopped. First came the EXTREME WEATHER WARNINGS, then came the ground-zero reports of stranded cars, then came the statistics about all the missed work and its effect on our poor economy…and then, inevitably, came the moaning. The English are not happy unless they have something to complain about. Hours of phone-in shows were taken up by disgruntled oiks bitching about their roads not being gritted quickly enough. Boy, and they say the Palestinians have it rough, eh?

Amusingly, this led to unprecedented levels of media attention for Canada, as everyone kept pointing out that severe snowstorms happen in Canada every year and cause barely any disruption at all. Some folks used Denmark as the comparison, but overall Canada seems to be the snow-defying nation that springs first to people’s minds. Hey, at least we’re getting noticed for something, even if it’s just our tolerance for bad weather.

Of course, all the folks eager to blame Britain’s government for the ‘inadequate’ response to the Great Snow Crisis failed to take one thing into account. Namely: the reason that Canada is so good at coping with snow is because IT SNOWS IN CANADA ALL THE TIME. So we tend to prepare for it. We prepare for it by paying an enormous amount of money for snowplows and gritting trucks and snow tyres and heated garages. If Britain paid the same amount of money for these services, there would be an amazingly quick response in the event of a snowstorm, which, as mentioned earlier, tends to happen about once every eighteen years. In the intervening seventeen years, you’d have a bunch of snowplows and gritting trucks sitting around at the ready, doing nothing and costing a fortune. Which the exact same people would ring in to call-in shows and complain about. Dear General Public: please get a sense of perspective.