Welcome back readers to another edition of my thoughts in cyber form. I will take you on a journey where the destination is unknown, even in my head, but as I write there will be plenty of road-side stops filled with rants, many junctions of humour with a few roundabouts of immaturity thrown in. Hopefully as you read this you are in a nice warm room and not out there in the blistering cold that we call winter. Of course if you are reading this in Australia or any southern hemisphere country, have a cold beer and try to stay cool. This week is all about the Great British weather and the way us Brits react to the tiniest change in temperature or climate.
As a British citizen I am programmed with the same mentality towards our weather as every other UK resident. We complain when it’s hot and we complain when it’s cold. In fact we complain when it’s not hot or cold. The truth is that the weather here on our beautiful green island is never the same for long and we never get used to it for long enough before it changes again. When the sun comes out we savour it for a few days. We wear shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops and do many outdoor activities to soak up the warm weather. After a while it goes in again and we all sigh and get on with mediocrity once again. The problem is that when the weather is hot we, as a country, collectively never want to do any work. People phone in sick, builders finish half way through the day, the beaches become packed with pasty overweight people and the bars spill out onto the streets. Suddenly we become a tropical island overnight. News reporters show temperatures of other countries and compare them to the UK, revealing that we are hotter than Miami, Athens and the surface of the Sun. We are top of the temperature tables for one week in a year hooray!!!
September and October come around and we are all on edge. What coat should I wear? Do we put the heating on yet? When does Alton Towers close for the season? Ultimately over the last few years the weather has only started to turn cold at the back end of December, give or take a few sub-zero days here and there. Then you get to January and February and suddenly the country becomes obsessed with how cold it is (including me). Some of the stories you hear are a bit extreme though. Airports at a standstill due to a foot of snow whereas in Oslo or Stockholm where they endure tens of feet of snow the airports operate all year round. How come they cope yet we leave half of our holiday makers stranded in Tenerife or Tokyo wondering when Heathrow Terminal 4 will reopen? It’s snow for goodness sake!! Why don’t we plan ahead for these things? Surely there is a climate secretary or a transport minister in the political world that has contingencies and budgets in place in case these common weather patterns occur.
We are not asking for a lot half of the time on the front line when it comes to planning ahead. Just for there to be enough grit on the roads for us to continue our daily routines without fear of black ice or abominable snowmen roaming our streets. The chaos that ensues whenever a freak weather system comes to our island is sometimes quite scary. When I see pictures on the news of cars being swept away by floods and whole city centres being engulfed in water through a river that has burst its banks, it makes me feel lucky to be living in a town where the only weather we worry about is the wind blowing our bins 200 yards down the road. This country is still very lucky when it comes to nature’s destructive power. We only get baby tornadoes, we have no known volcanically active mountain ranges and we only get tiny earthquakes that barely measure on the Richter scale. The fact that we live in a pleasantly safe environment doesn’t mean we can’t complain about our weather, far from it. My theory is that we have it so good over here that we almost have nothing to complain about at all. So the mere fact that we complain about the weather is just our way of saying that nothing’s wrong, but if we had to nit pick...
What will happen at the end of this week with regards to the snow on the way? Who can say but we are all in agreement that it could be a lot worse, so let’s all stop with the winging and get on with it. Right after we stop moaning about the credit crunch, teenage anti-social behaviour and the spineless Liberal Democrats. Thanks for reading.
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