Snow News is Bad News (For the UK, at least)

Woke up this morning and found we’d been gifted with a light dusting of snow, rekindling the strange fascination that the British have with the fluffy white stuff.

snow in great barr, birmingham Great Barr – Where the snow lay roundabout, deep and crisp and even

It’s has become somewhat the cliché to state that with the first sign of snow, the country grinds to a halt. Even so, to employ yet another tired cliché, there’s no smoke without fire, and it’s been proved time and again that the slightest dusting does indeed bring things to a standstill.

Since the passing of the eighties, winter snow, anywhere south of Newcastle, has become the rare commodity indeed, so much so that years have passed by without even a flutter. The tentative science of Global Warming promised warmer winters, and for a brief moment there, it looked like they could’ve been right. However, the past couple of years have seen a return of snowfall to Birmingham, and if the buzz on Twitter is anything to go by, the rest of the country too.

snowfall over the m6 motorway, great barr Snow over the M6 motorway (behind the fence)

Where we differ from the likes of, say, Canada or Greenland – who seem to have little trouble in negotiating the odd dumping of two foot of snow in less than an hour – is that we’ve become used to a snow-free existence, and the councils have mirrored this by setting less and less money aside to tackle the situation when it arises. Hence, we grind to a halt because it’s not deemed serious enough to send the gritters out until it’s too late. Mix in the fact that a good proportion of today’s drivers cut their teeth during the dry days of the nineties and the first half of the “noughties“, and have therefore never driven on snow in the way previous generations have, and the seeds are sewn for this particular catastrophe of a winter wonderland. And, of course, we mustn’t forget that old chestnut of it being “the wrong type of snow“.

Even so, this is still a mere dusting. A couple of inches doesn’t constitute a national emergency, although the London-based media mafia do their best to have you thinking to the contrary.

Snow on the garages and old quarry/landfill beyond

Anybody who grew up in Birmingham during the late seventies and early eighties will know what proper snow is. Snow that reached up past your knees – granted, our knees were a lot closer to the ground in those days – and could fall anytime from November onwards. Build a snowman in January in those halcyon days and the dome of its head would still be visible on the wet grass in April. Snow fell deep, lasted ages, and got you days off school or sent home from work.

We ploughed on regardless, with Wellington boots, wet feet and rosy-red, snowbitten faces, through blizzard conditions and snowflakes the size of dinner-plates. If we saw a return to those days, I’m assuming the country would not only grind to a halt but pick up its hat and leave via the nearest exit.

Still, it would keep two national obsessions, those of the weather and complaining, ticking along nicely, and, of course, give chancers such as myself something to write about.

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