NEWS & MEDIA

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IT'S SNOW JOKE!

If you’re living in the UK and reading this your probably wondering what the hell has been going on with the weather over the last couple of days? I myself thought I had been kidnapped and my bedroom rebuilt in Sweden till I walked outside and realised that it was highly unlikely they had a district line train in Sweden...and that everyone still seemed to be speaking English. For the last week it seems that England has been experiencing a real winter; every year it seems a typical winter can be personified by a bit of rain, a lot of darkness and a general mundanity in the conditions outside your window. However now we really are entering  a new phase of weather extremity; A woman in Tyneside has already died after going outside for a walk in the snow, temperatures in Scotland were as low as -22 and all over the UK people have been abandoning their cars, not turning up for work and cranking the heating up to 11. 



Already I have had work mates and friends who live in Sweden and beyond look incredulous at how a few inches of snow can literally bring a country to a standstill when they can still operate fine under a few feet of snow. It is quite pathetic really, a few inches of snow and it’s like armageddon has hit the UK with schools and office shutting, panic buying in stores and the front page of the papers screaming headlines like “Temperature will drop to -10 tonight! Half of UK set to die!”I guess our Scandinavian friends are right but what they have to remember is that this is unusual weather, can you imagine how lampooned the government would be if they went out and spent billions on gritters and shovels and then we never saw snow again? Exactly; Gordon Brown would be chased out of office before you can say snowflake. This is a freak weather occurrence and would be similar to the Scandinavians waking up and finding that they will have a summer of +60c weather, it’s something that’s likely to never happen.



I personally like the snowy weather; you can go sledging, build a snowman, through snowballs at

people and it actually feels like winter for once rather than just another day in England’s boring and never changing weather system. Who cares that we’re running out of grit or that people can’t get to work. So what if it’s freezing every night and you wake up thinking you’re puffing on a cigarette, this weather needs to be savoured and enjoyed before it disappears and everyone goes back to moaning about how it never snows. That’s the problem with us British, we bemoan the boring weather every day of the year yet as soon as it switches up and we find ourselves with some decent snow we simply start moaning about how cold it is, how we can’t get to work, how we’re having to turn the heating on in the house to stop everyone’s body parts from freezing off. Let’s all get out and enjoy the snow and spare a thought for other places of the world where it really is cold such as the village of Oymyakon in Eastern Siberia. Here the average winter temperature is -96°F (−71.1°C) and the school has only recently introduced an indoors toilet! The little village is home to 900 permanent residents, who endure winter for nine months out of the year, and consider -30°F (−34.4°C) to be a heat wave. So there you have it. Let’s get naked, get outside and enjoy this heat wave while we can!

WRITTEN BY JOHN CLARK                             NEWS & MEDIA WRITER FOR NSP MAGAZINE