Southern Shandy Swigging Scaredy Cat Snow Saps

If I see any more footage of frightened southerners staring quizzically at snow I shall scream and emigrate. To somewhere with nice weather, like Siberia. The hysteria surrounding ‘the worst snow in 20 years’ has reached fever pitch and if the media is to be believed, then we’d all be better off staying indoors to avoid attacks from hungry polar bears and being beaten to death with clubs by murderous Inuits.

It’s Tuesday morning and the BBC weather woman Carol Kirkwood has just destroyed a snow teapot in the Blue Peter garden. I’d like to say she’d kicked the fuck out of it before turning wild-eyed to the camera with a pendulum of snot dangling from her nose and shouting ‘Ave a bit o’ that Jack Frost, you big icy bastard!’ But she didn’t. She just leant on the handle and it fell off. Alongside willful acts of ice-sculpture vandalism, the breakfast programme has featured a debate about whether all cars should be fitted with metal-grip tyres and a short instructional report about the correct usage of ice-scrapers. The reporter watching the scraping demonstration looked not dissimilar to a caveman witnessing fire for the first time. Needless to say he was southern.

Sky - bastions of the understatement that they are - have sent a crack-team to a snowbound Silverstone to demonstrate correct braking procedures, using a high performance rally car with massive tyres and ABS brakes. The sort of car you see driving round London in the snow all the time. Hmmm… I don’t remember them wheeling Ray Mears out to give rudimentary kayaking lessons when the people of Sheffield were being forced to swim to the shops for some teabags and a pound of mince. Such footage will do nothing for north/south relations, omnipresent and tense at the best of times.

The Scots must be pissing themselves at the whole thing, surveying the English jessies from atop their mountains in their winter get up of flip-flops and polo-shirts. They have REALLY bad weather. The sort of weather that makes your toes fall off in June and icicles grow in the womens beards. The Londoncentric media coverage really is ridiculous. A state of national-crisis is declared because a few ponytailed cockney spivs can’t get to their office for 24 hours to gamble the rest of our money down the shitter. Have a day off and build a snowman like normal people.



Fast forward to Thursday morning and the crisis still hasn’t abated. They’ve run out of grit in Watford and thousands of people are meeting with horrific, frictionless deaths. Their vehicles pirouetting across dual-carriageways like an RTA version of Swan Lake. No such problems up north. When we run out of salt and grit, our northern highways are protected by big burly men in donkey jackets shoveling on leftover gravy and whippet shit. It’s called preparation. Mind you, you don’t see any coverage of such ingenious enterprise on the TV, although I daresay you would if it was being done anywhere south of Birmingham.

I’ve often wondered whether it would be possible to dig a deep trench from west coast to east coast, dissecting a point somewhere just below Brum, and then push the bottom island in the general direction of France. We’d be rid of them forever, they wouldn’t have to deal with snow anymore, and it would take me less than an hour to reach the south coast for my summer holiday on the Wolverhampton Riviera. Everyone’s a winner. It makes perfect sense.

But until I have the financial/political/technological clout to make this happen, I’ll have to make do with that trip to Siberia. My Bermuda shorts are packed, I’ve got a bag full of abrasive dog-shit and I’m off to show them how to use an ice-scraper. Properly.