Britain: Get a grip! Literally.

I heard on the radio this morning that Scotland can expect another fortnight (2 weeks) of bad weather and ‘snow storms’. For us, being used to a more arctic climate from back home and all, the weather situation here is really not even worth mentioning compared to what we are used to.

Imagine this: -40 Celsius and so much snow in the morning that you can hardly even find your car, let alone start it because the cold drained the battery. Add cold wind and even more snow coming down while you are trying to salvage your car from the parking lot where the snowplow drove past and covered the back of the car with wet snow that turned into solid ice overnight. By the time you are done scraping your windscreen free from snow and ice, your layers of t-shirts, long johns and socks are soaking wet from snow and sweat.

We rarely get snow here in Edinburgh in the winter, but this year we have had a bit of snow for the last 3-4 weeks, and we are talking about 1-2 inches on the ground, which in fairness has made the streets quite slippery. The result of this weather situation has been closed airports, closed highways, closed schools and people staying home from work. Someone at my work told me about her friend who had been completely stuck in her car on the M8, a major highway, for 15 hours before the army came and dug them out! Why? No snow tires. Someone else had seen their neighbour scraping off ice from his car with the backrest of a plastic garden chair!

At the moment, the situation here is kind of a mix between the movies ‘Ice Age’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’; it is a bit funny in a tragic kind of way how paralyzed people get and how serious they take ‘the blizzards’. They just don’t know how to deal with all this snow. Another example of the effects of these extreme conditions is our front door at work, which has been broken and left open since New Year’s Eve. This apparently due to the cold and the snow, and the repairmen in this country do not always have the best sense of urgency. This has resulted in a very cold reception area with a very moody receptionist wearing gloves and a winter coat inside.