A Million Reasons for Wanting to Carry on Living

No-one seems to be running about taking photos of the snow or making snowpersons or writing paeans to the icy frosty wet stuff. Could it be that Londoners are as unfazed by snow as they are by everything else??

The first few years I lived here, it didn't snow at all. There was a light fluttering in December 1999, but it didn't settle. The first proper snow I can remember was in March 2005, but according to my pictorial records, by the end of the month, it was hot enough to walk around the River Lea in a t-shirt.

Now we've had three snowfalls in two years, it's meh as usual for Southerners, they are becoming Northerners. In South Yorkshire, we had snow every year. Sometimes the schools closed (anxiously listening around BBC Radio Sheffield), sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they were open, but the buses didn't turn up. Sometimes they were open, but you were sent home because the boilers had broken. Sometimes, the gas, electric and phone lines went down. This all seemed quite normal, although I expect it was more of an inconvenience to the adults than to me.

The annoying thing is that idiots are now saying: This proves we're in a new ice age and global warming is a myth, whereas as I understand it (I am no boffin scientist), the ice-caps melting means the end of our gulf stream which means hotter and wetter summers, colder winters. If you look at New York and Portugal on a map, they have the same latitude but because the US has no gulf stream, they have much colder winters, but it can still get to 40 degrees C in the summer. Ironically, the warmer in the summer and the colder in the winter means that people will use more cooling and heating, leading to more global warming/cooling. And people forget that this is global, if you look at the temperatures in Bulgaria, it seems like we're having their winter. 19 degrees C in December in Central Europe is Not At All Right. People have such a localised view on things, people are happy with holidaying in the UK and English wine and talk of olive groves and coffee plantations, forgetting that the flipside of this is forest fires in Australia and people underwater in Bangladesh & Pakistan and harvest failure in Africa (but maybe someone will make a Lolcat style HARVEST FAIL meme)

Anyway, here's the view from my window.



Edit: Actually, I do remember being in a blizzard in February 2002, but it had all gone by the next day.