The car park at my office has gone from snow to ice, making it even more fun. Much of England is reacting as normal to the snow by grinding to a halt and blaming someone else. And my fingers have only just started to warm up, thanks mainly to the soup I’m eating. Mmmm soup.
The thing is, we’d best get used to it. Take a look at a map, Glasgow (where I’m currently based) is at the same latitude as Moscow and New Foundland. These are places that are generally known for being a bit chilly in the winter. Nay most of the time. But here in the UK it tends to be damp, damp is a great word to describe our weather. But not, freezing cold with tons of snow, well not normally. And for this we have to thank the Gulf Stream, which runs lots of lovely warm water up the side of the British Isles and keeps us from having to learn how to drive in snow (carefully, calmly and attentively for those thousands of Audi drivers out there). And the thing with the Gulf Stream, like much of the workings of the planet, we’re not completely sure how it works.
Did you know it turned off for 10 days in 2004? I didn’t. And the fun bit is no one is sure why, I don’t know about you but that worries me slightly. The UK is currently doing really well at proving we aren’t set up to cope with long term cold weather. right now the forecast is for things to warm up to a balmy 6-8C real soon now. But what about next year, heck what about next month?
Now when we need to blow the crap out of countries because they’ve not got WMD’s but we think they do, we can find money. When the banks dig a huge hole and then jump into it we can find money to bail them out. Meanwhile the infrastructure of the country is a wreck, and we’re told we’re all going to have to tighten our belts no matter who we vote for this year.
Tighten out belts and put two pairs of socks and a jumper on I think.