John: Who shall we blame next for the snow chaos?

Jan 14 2010 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THIS has truly been a winter of discontent. A measure of that has been the Examiner’s Mailbag, its letters columns, in which a great number of people have explained how the bad weather has affected them.

In the days before Christmas, when the first light flakes of snow began to flutter down, the Mailbaggers kept meteorologically mum.

It was almost as if people didn’t want to wish too hard (in print) that there’d be a White Christmas, perhaps for fear of being considered politically incorrect, mawkish or plain sociopathic.

When the serious snow and the temperatures plummeted and stayed down, the letters started to come in.

To start with, they were not happy and had many questions: What do we pay our Council Tax for, when the ploughs and gritters are nowhere to be seen? Where are the binmen, the posties and the buses? Why hasn’t somebody swept my path?

This first indignant and intemperate rush of correspondence made us all look, in retrospect, like a bunch of whingers (Disgusted of Upper Buggins) who had nothing better to do than twitch the net curtains with notebook in hand, recording the exact minute when the services they’d paid good money for did or didn’t arrive.

The scattergun of approbation caught the meteorologists, the council and its workers, the Royal Mail and independent delivery services, the people who put the civic Christmas trees up and those who then draped them with lights – even the Copenhagen climate change conference.

I did hear a word of praise for the conference, actually.

“That’s amazing,” said one. “They didn’t appear to be agreeing on anything, but they stopped global warming in its tracks straight away. Just look at this snow!”

The second phase was a sea-change, the kind of phenomenon David Attenborough is wont to observe among dense shoals of Atlantic herring.

“That’s amazing,” he breathes. “They didn’t appear to be agreeing on anything, but look how they all turned in another direction simultaneously!”

Suddenly, as if by magic, people started to feel guilty about whingeing.