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..There's a little Samuel Pepys in all of us..

Friday, January 31, 2003

Even the weather's playing it's part in this small corner of history.
For, as Tony and Spain head west for Camp David talks with George, the county's attention is drawn to domestic problems, as this winters snowfall has brought chaos to the island's roads and power services.
For those used to the North American winter, it would be a surprise to see such havoc caused by such mediocre weather.
Blizzards..one recalls one back in 1973 when skiing in the Bruce Penninsula, in Ontario, it laid three and a half feet of snow down in two days of weather you couldn't see the back of your hand in. One also recalls it was over a weekend, and it didn't stop the old Walkerton Hotel to suffer much of a shortage of customers. And most of them made it back to their beds that evening as well, as many as would have had it been summer at any rate..
But here, three inches can bring the whole infrastructure to a puzzled halt.
In some defence it must be admitted that while the snowfall itself might seem insignificant, it is constantly on the move, unless frozen solidly to something that wasn't designed to bear it's weight. The likes of badly guyed power lines, just to pick one out of the hat..
However, it does make driving a dangerous passtime for those who didn't grow up waiting for this weather, so we could take the car into Loblaw's parking lot and do spinouts. This culture is based on a twice daily migration. By car, by train, by bus, the entire country moves itself from home to office, and all this in a crowd. When one twit loses their rear end on some ice and slides to rest blocking the road, it holds up an amazing amount of traffic.
So while Tony heads off to the cold of Maryland, for what's been dubbed 'a council of war', the nation shakes it's collecive head, and mulls over more important issues.
We'll get back to the war when we've got a cuppa in our hands.

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