John: We’re all snow persons now

Jan 7 2010 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

AS IF to deliver a smack on the chops to the Jeremiahs of global warming, Britain has spent the New Year so far shivering under a blanket of snow and ice.

This has introduced the latest generation of children to the delights of snowmen, sledging and chilblains.

The politically correct will rap my knuckles and tell me I should say ‘snowpersons’, I suppose.

I have this to say to feminists: no woman in her right mind would stand out in this weather, silently sucking a carrot, with twigs in her ears and trying to see through lumps of coal, with last year’s scarf round the place where their neck isn’t.

Let’s stick with snowmen.

Huddersfield folk, curiously, have not stuck with snowmen at all. It is reported that this year’s fashions have included snow-crocodiles, snow-meercats and snow-aliens.

Anyway, did the global warmers get it wrong? Is this in fact the start of a new Ice Age?

No. To be fair, the climate change bods have always said a winter can go either way with temperatures. This is especially true at a local level. One cold winter doth not an Ice Age make. We need to watch the big picture, apparently.

A dash of crispy, pristine, picture-postcard snow over our hills and valleys can’t be expected to make much of a difference to that mean global temperature that, year in and year out, creeps inexorably upward.

On a more practical level, and leaving aside all the fun and parent-child bonding that has been brought about through snow-thing building and breakneck tobogganing, we haven’t fared well this winter.

There have been grumbles that Kirklees Highways have not ploughed and gritted the roads as well and as often as they have done in past cold snaps, and Kirklees Environmental Services have not been round to empty the bins as religiously as they might.

Pavements have been like ice rinks and elderly and disabled people have been trapped in their homes.