Thursday, February 08, 2007

I really don't like snow and ice that much. I tend to like water in it's varied forms (hey, it's certainly the cutest sixty percent of my body mass) but I'm not too keen on it when it's solid because if there's one thing I like more than water it's notfreezingmyfuckingarseoff and the presence of snow tends to point towards the buttock-clenchingly chilly. After that "Squeeeeee! Snow!" moment you get on waking in the morning and looking out the window it's a vale of fucking tears my friend and let no-one tell you any different.

It's partly the fact that the United Kingdom is so shit at dealing with snow. All essential services grind to a halt as though the white stuff were some foreign concept. "'Snow' you say? Never heard of it. Sounds like some beastly trick of the European Union to make us abandon the pound. God save the Queen!" In fact, Londoner's learnt to live with the Blitz and Irish bombs so you would have thought we could have learnt to adapt to the snow. But no, first the train network breaks down because, being only a mere century or so old, they haven't had the time yet to R&D something to deal with the problem of snow on the line.

Roads generally don't have the same problems they did in the past. These days metropolitan areas have snow ploughs and gritters. In villages like the one where my parents live and I grew up (it's a fairly suburban village, it is surrounded by farms but the farmers are related only by marriage, not by birth as well) you are taking more chances when you go out driving. For many years we did have a big yellow bin at our end of the village on which was written 'SALT' but then we also had teenagers, so now when we have snow it's like Winter in Narnia. We did have Anne Widdicombe as our local MP but she never rode around on a sleigh or offered kids sweets.

Then there is the ritual of listening to local radio in the hopes it will be announced that your school was shut. This rarely happened to me as most of my schools were on main roads and I suspect the snow ploughs and gritters were in the pay of the headmaster. So instead we had the ritual of the mass snowball fights on the school fields. First break was always the best time as we ran out in to that snow that was as pure and virginal as the first form boys who would soon be covered in most of it. Mine was a school of traditions: prefects, the Combined Cadet Force and PE Teachers with drink problems and the belief that kids were given to them to help ease the frustrations of their unhappy marriages (Hel-lo Mr Diamond if you're out there!) and the tradition of the snow was that on the field race didn't matter, religion was unimportant, your father's conviction for embezzlement was forgotten, you were a band of brothers (I went to a single sex school, does it show?) with everyone in your year and your aim was simple: To find how fast snow had to travel to pierce the skin of someone younger than you. Once that was ascertained the next ritual was to sit shivering through lessons for the rest of the day because your clothes were all wetter than if they'd been put in the washing machine. You know that film Final Destination where the kids don't die in the plane crash and Death comes after them because he's pissed off with being cheated? We had buses with bad breaks and hills that tended not to be gritted. I cheated Death enough times going to school that I got invited to his sister's wedding and met his parents.

When you go out to work it's still the same. Will your business open and, if it does, will you get to go home early? For some reason, probably related to the way they automatically close for Christmas fortnight, most council departments decide not to bother opening when the white stuff is one the ground but libraries are expected to keep going regardless, as though people think they half-remember some old report about how the reading brain generates enough power to heat a small flat. We were due to stay open until 8:00 pm and had to wait until after lunch for the important decision from the management about whether we would shut and go home early. And it's one of those classic double binds, on the one hand we might get to finish early and go home, but on the other hand the library is better heated than my flat. Seeing as the management will go home early anyway it's never easy to guess how much they will care about the plight of their staff but in this case they let us close early. So I came home and had a warm bath.

I've wandered away from my point, whatever it was. Something to do with the sucking of snow and ice. But really, snow isn't that bad I suppose, it's when it melts and refreezes, that's the unpleasant time. I'm not looking forward to tomorrow, when the one mile gentle slope between my house and my place of work is transformed into a fiendish death-trap. I tend to end up having to take my chances walking in the road rather than on the sheet-ice pavements. Never mind these shoes for kids with wheels in the heels so as to allow the child to bend backwards, fall over and hilariously crack their skull on something sharp, the person who invents a successful shoe with a furnace underneath to allow us to burn holes in ice and so be guaranteed firm footing in snow will make a fortune.

Roll on the summer, I've already prepared my essay complaining about excessive heat and how ice cubes melt so quickly.

Labels: , , ,


|



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?