Cold weather is snow joke

Right: everybody panic!

According to... well, everybody, really, we are in the grips of an unprecedented ‘snowmageddon’, as the ‘beast from the east’ makes it’s parky presence well and truly felt.

I live in 100+ year old house, with the original single-glazed windows, so I’ve achieved an expert-level understanding of when it really IS cold. Somewhere around the time the second pair of socks under the heavily padded, ankle-covering slippers become ineffective is a sure sign. If this is combined with over three layers of clothing at body-level, then it’s official.

There has been some industrial-strength scaremongering from the papers and TV news. If you believe any/all of it, Spring has been cancelled for starters. Odd, as I swear I saw a daffodil the other day. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it can be postponed, but not actually cancelled altogether. Unless Trump and Kim Jong Un actually do throw their toys out of their prams, and press their big red nuclear buttons. In which case, bagsy the frozen penguin burger.

‘Snowbomb’ has also been bandied around, which actually sounds like fun. ‘Polar vortex’ also suggests suitably, and literally, chilling conditions. It’s also a ‘danger to life’. Really? Very cold weather is dangerous for the elderly, very young and infirm? Who’d have guessed? I mean, it’s not like it’s ever been cold before, is it? Thanks for the warning! I’ll put some trousers on.

Whilst we’re at it, have you noticed how TV weather forecasters are now mostly describing the temperatures with the wind-chill factor included? That’s like me claiming I jumped 17 feet at school sports day, but including the indentation in the sand where I landed and fell forward with my arms outstretched.

In other stating-the-chuffing-obvious news, we should apparently make sure to heat our homes to at least 18C. All right – don’t go setting unachievable targets, you monsters. I’m having to saw up furniture to burn.

On the slightly positive side, it seems other parts of the country are copping the worst of it. Our Scottish countrymen will tough it out – hell, they might even put a coat on – but the South East?

There is panic, and rolling news coverage showing the same car with it’s wheels spinning, whilst a hapless reporter who forgot to buy a Secret Santa gift finds themselves stood by the side of a road whilst the blizzard blows horizontally, just in case you’re unfamiliar with what snow and stationary traffic looks like.

In a vain attempt to put all the doom-laded predictions in context, we’re apparently in the grip of the coldest February... in five years. Five? I’ve got underpants older than that.

So whilst we’re all whining and panicking, think about 1963’s Big Freeze (which my parents always brought up any time I ever dared to suggest it had snowed a lot) or late ‘78/early ’79 (which still didn’t shut them up). They were properly nasty.

It’s winter. What were we expecting? I’m off to throw some more sideboard on the fire.

This post first appeared as the lead piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 2nd of March 2018, where it was re-titled as "Spring is cancelled", which was exactly not what I said in the article! It was accompanied by a picture looking towards Burlington quarry in the snow (not the one included above, which is at Brathay in Ambleside).

Fun times - I didn't make it to work on Wednesday, as it turns out small, rear-wheel drive, city cars are utterly hopeless in a few inches of snow. I did try, but turned around... then couldn't get up the hill back home. Still, nice to go for a walk in the snow, eh?

(CD A-Z: The blues-tastic Jimmy Witherspoon's "Ain't Nobody's Business".)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog