Love To Moan About The Weather
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By Peter McKay for the Daily Mail 23:56 BST 19 Dec 2010 , updated 01:23 BST 21 Dec 2010
Trying to explain what strange people we are, an American wit said: ‘Everyone in Britain talks about the weather continuously, but no one does anything about it.’
We talk about it when it’s hot: ‘Phew, what a scorcher. London sizzles.’ When it’s cold: ‘Arctic Britain.’ And even when it’s neither one thing nor another.
Today we rage about our inability to cope with a foot or so of snow.
On Saturday, Heathrow was closed and M25 traffic at a standstill. Some airline passengers have been stranded in terminals for days. Others sat for six hours in a jet which didn’t take off.
Countless motorists and lorry drivers spent the night behind their steering wheels. Towns and villages were ‘cut off’, and sports events cancelled.
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In London, it took me three hours to drive ten miles on what I regarded as an urgent mission. It would have been far longer without my despised, 4x4 ‘Chelsea tractor’.
Transport Secretary Phil Hammond assured us the Government was doing everything in its power to cope, but we’re bombarded by evidence that foreigners who endure worse weather — such as Sweden and the United States — manage to do better.
We’re not geared up for extreme weather because we don’t have it often enough. Some winters pass with only a light dusting of snow, or none at all. The average one involves a day or two, at most, of snow disruption. If the climate is warming up — as we’re assured it is — snow might become a thing of the past in Britain.
There was a TV documentary at the weekend suggesting that even butterflies are moving north for this reason.
Of course, the warmists might be wrong. Some of us remember the New Ice Age theories of the 1970s, when scientists believed with certainty that our climate was cooling. We’re said now to be living through the coldest December since records began in 1910.We keep stockpiles of grit and salt but not enough efficient, expensive snow-clearing vehicles at airports. Why not?
The Fire Service keeps its own expensive vehicles and staff there, and uses them only very rarely. Airport operator BAA shut both runways at Heathrow at 11am on Saturday and didn’t open them again until 3pm. British Airways cancelled all of its flights from Heathrow and Gatwick.
Too drastic a response? BA passengers were furious to see other airlines operating as usual. A Russian passenger stranded overnight at Heathrow said: ‘In Moscow we have minus 30 and still there are flights.’ As for BAA, Stockholm had snow, too, but the only planes not to arrive or leave were British.
Is there something in the British character that quietly revels in our inability to cope with extreme weather? The current warning from motoring organisations — ‘don’t travel unless you have to’ - suggests one possible reason: we don’t really like the thought of others travelling. More than any other people, we deplore tourism, even while on package holidays ourselves. We pride ourselves on selecting destinations that aren’t too ‘touristy’ — as if we’re culture-loving, — modern-day aristocrats on a grand tour.
In Britain, you can pass practically any law — or push through any new tax — if it targets motorists. For every person complaining about being stuck at an airport, or on a snow-blocked motorway, there will be at least ten saying they shouldn’t have been travelling in the first place. They’re too rich, they’re skiving off work, or they’re doing it on benefits. Isn’t that the heart of the problem?
If everyone were dancing with fury about our collective response to the delays and inconveniences caused by the weather, something would be done about it. But politicians won’t waste their time once they sense public indifference, or hostility. For many, though, it’s not just indifference but actual dislike of a hurrying, scurrying world in which everyone has to get here, there or anywhere without delay.
Some enjoy it when nature, in the form of snow, stops us in our tracks, proving that not everything is subject to our manic need to travel.
Sitting stationary on London’s North Circular road as cars and lorries skated and skidded in slow motion before and behind me, I saw where those people were coming from.
Amanda ‘Foxy Knoxy’ Knox wins an important appeal ordering a review of the DNA evidence on which she was convicted of killing fellow student Meredith Kercher.
Meanwhile, there’s a new blaze of publicity suggesting police in South Africa have mishandled the investigation into the ‘honeymoon murder’ of Anni Dewani, offering reduced sentences to the killers after they implicated her ‘madly in love’ husband, Shrien, thus switching the blame away from crime-infested South Africa.
At the same time, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - toast of the fashionable Left - suffers a drop in his share value after new reports about his seedy sexual activities. It’s reported that he and his chief supporter at The Guardian are not on speakers.
Even the McCanns, who got newspapers to apologise for doubting what they said about their missing daughter, Madeleine, are on the ‘down’ public esteem escalator after it was reported that British police helped Portuguese colleagues build a case against them.
In the instant world of internet, Facebook and Twitter commentary - faithfully repeated by the Press and TV - you are up one moment and down the next. On a rollercoaster - as everyone always says when questioned on TV about how they feel.
CIA station chief in Pakistan, Jonathan Bank, had to flee the country to avoid being prosecuted over the killing of innocent people by U.S. ‘drone’ flights.
Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney escaped extradition to Nigeria in a multi-million-dollar bribery case after the energy firm Halliburton, which he headed in the 1990s, paid £161 million in fines.
We approach the 50th anniversary next month of President David ‘Ike’ Eisenhower’s speech warning Americans not to fall under the control of ‘the military-industrial complex’.
World War II’s supreme commander of allied forces in Europe, supreme commander of Nato and later Republican U.S. president, Eisenhower, born in 1890, was no Leftie.
But he warned against creating ‘a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions’ which would manipulate policy on its own behalf — ie, start and continue wars when it chose in order to boost its profits.
Eisenhower beseeched Americans to break away from a reliance on military power as a guarantor of liberty, and seek instead to ‘use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment’.
Thanks to that military-industrial complex, America spends more on arms now than the next 15 largest military budgets combined.
BBC sports commentator Gary Lineker’s second wife, former lingerie model Danielle, 31, (pictured in the Caribbean last week) says she has been having secret acting lessons while acting as a stepmother to his four teenage sons.
‘I’d love to do some more theatre, do some more acting, and hopefully if that takes off and I can get my career moving in the right direction, maybe a baby.’
Lineker, 50, is praised for his shrewd soccer judgment. How delighted he must be to have a wife who has her head screwed on!
The comedian Frankie Boyle is in the national doghouse for making a bad joke about Jordan, who makes a living exposing her artificially enhanced breasts in redtop newspapers and cable TV shows aimed at undiscerning viewers.
The ‘joke’ involved her blind, autistic son, Harvey. It was cruel and unfunny.
Boyle, 38, lives in Glasgow with his partner, Shereen Taylor, and their two children, born in 2004 and 2007. He admits neglecting his family for his career, according to a biographical website, and to being a recovering alcoholic and drug user.
Given this background, you’d think he’d be sensitive — that he’d ‘ca canny’, (be careful) as Scots say — when making jokes about children.
But he’s a comedian, not a social worker. He doesn’t care about causing offence.
If we don’t accept this, the solution is simple.
Ban Boyle from ever appearing again on TV. Boycott his shows in theatres and clubs. Banish newspapers which publish his columns.
But I doubt if he’s lost a single fan. He might be barred from TV for a time — and dropped by newspapers — but if he makes people laugh he’ll make a living.
Here’s another perspective from deaf comedian Steve Day, who told The Times: ‘Here we are with a world in uproar over a joke, while millions of disabled people are living in fear that their benefits are going to be stopped to help pay for a situation caused by millionaire bankers.
‘They’d much rather be the victim of a joke than kicked down again.
‘If disabled people do get a bit precious, I think they should grow up and realise it’s a price worth paying for not being ignored.
‘Just because you’re disabled doesn’t mean you’re not a pompous idiot.’
Labour now poses as protector of the Queen’s head in the great Royal Mail rumpus.
Shadow business secretary John Denham points out that the Coalition Government has left ‘glaring loopholes’ - such as not insisting on the continued use of the monarch’s likeness on stamps - as it tries to sell the company.
According to Denham: ‘They think the fewer strings they attach, the more money they will get from a foreign buyer.The fact that they have not bothered to protect the monarch’s head on our stamps shows how desperate they are to sell Royal Mail off as quickly as possible and for as much cash as possible.’
Is Denham having a laugh? I didn’t know (until reading the Mail on Sunday yesterday) that we’re the only nation allowed to use our head of state’s likeness on our stamps.
So you’d think any incoming firm - even if it’s German or Dutch - would want to preserve this advantage. Unless, of course, they’d sell more stamps with Cheryl Cole’s likeness on them.
A young lady expecting a bouquet from a new admirer is given some greenery instead.
She responds gracefully. ‘With fronds like these, who needs anemones?’ she says.
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PETER MCKAY: Admit it, we just love to moan about the weather
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Weather experts are meeting to discuss what is behind the UK's unusual weather conditions over the last three years. It certainly seems to many like Britain is getting wetter and colder, or is it just that Britons love a good moan about a national obsession?
"Will we ever get a summer?" Michael Fish asked in the Daily Express earlier this month.
He was speaking at the end of the coldest spring for 50 years and after average temperatures dropped to 2.2C in March.
Parts of Britain may be expected to bask in hot weather over the next couple of days but the bracing spring, along with last year's wet summer and 2010's chilly winter will be on the Met Office's agenda as the experts investigate the causes of our recent "unusual seasons".
That unseasonal weather saw snow falling as late as May in parts of Britain. The freezing March was the second coldest since records began.
It's new extremes like that one that prompted one newspaper to label the UK: "Deep freeze Britain... now colder than Lapland".
In 2011, Scotland had its wettest year on record with 73.2in (1859.5mm) of rain, beating a previous record set in 1990.
The year before witnessed the coldest December in the UK since nationwide records began 100 years ago.
At the beginning of that record wet summer last year was the Thames river pageant.
Watched by millions across the globe, it was supposed to be a quintessentially British event - 1,000 boats sailing down the Thames in summer, cheered on by flag-waving well-wishers celebrating the Queen's 60-year reign.
But perhaps what was most identifiably British about the day was the relentlessly miserable weather.
The camera lenses capturing pictures for viewers from South Africa to Singapore were splattered with rain throughout the day.
The million-plus onlookers on the banks of a grey Thames hunched under union jack umbrellas and wandered around, spirits considerably dampened, in sodden ponchos.
That wet summer - one of the focuses of the Met Office's experts - was preceded by another extreme.
It followed earlier hosepipe bans and drought warnings. Rivers registered both their lowest and highest flows since records began.
"There's no doubt the last couple of years have actually been atypical", says Andrew Watts, chairman of the National Farmers Union crops board.
"It's an old British adage but we don't have seasons, just weather. I wouldn't say it's worse than before but it's more variable."
Farming suffered again earlier this year when unseasonal snow led to thousands of sheep and cattle freezing to death.
For some, though, the weather's effects are far less serious.
Revellers at world-famous outdoor British summertime events like Glastonbury and Wimbledon are regularly deluged but rarely put off.
In fact, says Dave Richardson, who has been going to the June festival for the last 10 years, the British weather brings festival-goers together.
Two months of rain in 2005 washed tents away and turned the farm into a giant mud bath. There were similar scenes in 2007.
"People tend to fight through it and make more of an effort to talk to each other. And the traders love it because they sell loads of wellies," Dave says.
So could unpredictable, colder and wetter conditions actually bring people together?
Kate Fox, co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre, says complaining about the weather has always been a very English trait.
"Shared moaning is just as effective in promoting sociable interaction and social bonding as shared optimism, shared speculation or shared stoicism," she writes in a yet-to-be-published update to her book Watching the English.
But exactly what causes the weather that allows us to engage in shared moaning remains a mystery.
"The aim is to understand some of the causes behind that variability," said Met office spokesman Dan Williams.
"A lot of those potential causes cannot easily be attributed to climate change. The more we can understand about these potential causes, the better advice we can give on near-term climate from a month out to about a year ahead."
Experts to analyse 'unusual' weather
Met Office advice was 'not helpful'
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