Review of the Week: How Not to Talk About the Weather?

Is is possible to write about the week that has just passed without mentioning the weather? Should I try? Would there be any virtue in trying to ignore what everyone else is talking about? And when I have completely isolated myself from the human race - what then?

Years ago, when I was about 19, I was a member of a team of public speakers, in a competition organised by the European Iron and Steel Community, the forerunners of the now EC. (When did it become EC from EEC? Was I not watching that day?) Our speech, which I gave, was on the virtues of bringing European people together by binding them in an economic way. In it I referred to a newspaper headline from the Thirties, much quoted since: ‘Fog in the Channel: Continent Isolated’. The UK has always had a penchant (damn - a French word for which we have no apparent equal) for seeing the entire world through the eyes of the occupants of a tiny little island. We have not yet learned to be Euro-centric, far from it! We are UK-centric, and often even smaller in our perceived position, being Scots, or Welsh, or Irish in our centricity. And this week, would there be any point in being otherwise?

So, let’s talk about the weather. Well, hasn’t it been cold? AOL, my internet provider claimed this week that Scotland had been as cold as the Antarctic, and then quoted minus temperatures so high (-9, I seem to remember) as to make themselves look really silly. Why, last year I travelled in Mongolia, where regularly the temperatures run to 30 below and more - so what are we fussing about?

It’s cold, yes. There is snow on the ground and the little estates in the city I live in are iced up. All the main roads seem to have been cleared, and the M25, and M1 which I travelled on to get back from Heathrow, had been beautifully cleared, despite overnight snow Wednesday to Thursday. Another headline in our wonderful UK-centric press assured us that we are running out of grit to use on the roads, implying that the world as we know it was coming to an end. Schools closed - more because teachers could not reach them than because children, who largely live on the areas they attend school, could not. What a delight it is to go to school, getting wetter and wetter and colder and colder, and then to spend the day looking longingly out at the fun you are missing, until you can repeat the experience on the way home thus really annoying your parents and significant others with drying they cannot possible hope to do!

But schools closed. And after two days’ closure they reopened on Friday, to the disappointment of children and teachers alike. I know my grand-daughters were both rather disappointed, since they had enjoyed the snow in their back garden and local park a great deal. They were delighted, however, at the little paths cut out for them to access school by the site manager. (It would be fair to say, however, that few children availed themselves of said paths, preferring to get knee-deep into the wonderful crisp white wet stuff that surrounded the lovely little paths!) Now it is weekend as the kids are out in force, chucking snowballs and getting frozen and trailing the wet into the house, as is traditional at these times.

There are villages where people are cut off. Fresh vegetables are not reaching us all, it is true. My friend is concerned that her very aged mother cannot be reached at present. When she talked to her on the phone she said that everything was fine. She is using up some of the provisions she was keeping for a rainy day, reasoning that snow counts too, and that it would be a positive relief not to have to do the 5-a-day thing for a bit, and eat soup and baked beans on toast, ignoring the need for fresh anything. She remembers the War. Things, she recalls, were far worse then. Her neighbours had beaten their way across the lawn to her, to make sure she was doing all right, and she had assured them all was fine.

We do make a lot of fuss about a little weather. It is traditional. So, I didn’t try not to mention it after all. It snowed this week, and is going to do it again next week. It’s January, and we are a very Northern country, so maybe we should not be too surprised. Let’s hope all neighbours are as supportive as my friend’s mother’s are. Sometime in the next month or so it will all thaw and we will find someting else to obsess about. I’m looking forward to being able to meet someone, or talk to them on the phone, without mentioning the weather. I don’t foresee it happening this week though.

Dianna Moylan (editorial team)

Tags: cold, isolation, school closures, snow, weather