The Snow Day

By Alex Allen

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Few things seem to generate such a great mis mash of chaos, jubilation and surprise as snow in this country. A celebrity dying, a new England football manager, the final of the The Apprentice, these are the things that are traditionally paramount in stirring our apathetic nation. Snow, strangely, eclipses all of these. There can be as little as a single inch covering the ground, and the whole country comes to a complete stand still. Suddenly, nobody can do anything. Roads are closed, offices and schools shut their doors and people keenly watch weather updates wondering what will happen next. It's as close to an apocalypse as we're likely to see in our lifetime. You can almost feel a genuine air of 'run! Take what you can and save yourselves!' in the air. People feel a spontaneous urge to rush home, clutch loved ones and light candles. Cars lie abandoned at the side of duel carriageways.

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The thing is, snow days are the biggest con ever. 'Oh the snow was so terrible I just couldn't do anything!' Yes, well you couldn't do anything that you didn't want to do. I'm sure the avalanche that prevented you from making it to work for nine didn't prevent you from going shopping or spending the afternoon in the pub instead. It's a total nonsense! New York, Vancouver, Copenhagen, do these countries just shut down for the winter and cease trading? Do the residents hoard canned items like squirrels and just try and brave the weather indoors until spring comes? Of course they don't! It's just an unwritten rule that snowy weather entitles you, the British citizen, one complimentary day off. We all know that snow is absolutely not a plausible excuse for you not being able to attend whichever function you didn't want to turn up to. And it's ok, other countries do it all the time, let's just embrace it.

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People don't seem to know how to process this crazy weather, 52% of our days are overcast, we're not used to it. On my way home from work yesterday, one newspaper stand described the snow as 'the worst snowfall in 18 years'. Doesn't this seem just a little gloomy? Are we not in reality really rather happy about the snow? A day off work, although not for me unfortunately, something interesting to look at, a little excitement in our lives amidst the daily grind. A few metres on and another sign conversely read, 'Snow Day!' We just don't seem to able to agree on what we think of this weather phenomenon, are we for or against? I think it might be down to the general rarity of it, we form an opinion on snow, but there is such a long gap between one spate and another that we lose sight of it. And then there's this strange 'since records began' business. When did records begin? We seem to constantly be beating them, I say we, we're driving the cars and burning the coal, surely we have more claim to these records than the year they happened to happen in. Experts rumble on about global warming, but could it not just be that these records are a bit, well, shit? And if we really shouldn't be trying to beat them because that means that we're destroying our planet, then isn't it really a little shortsighted to have them in the first place? If the MET office say, 'the worst rain fall for June was 1976', then of course we're going to want to beat it, in the same way that my flatmate ate a moth for absolutely no reason other than simply proving to someone he could. We're only human. These things happen. One thing is for certain, not since Kerry Katona has something so undeserving and generally uninteresting generated so many column inches. For adding to those inches, I apologise. More interesting and meaningful subject matter to come I promise.