This night is winding down, but time means nothing

That awkward moment when the UK warns you about an eventual ‘killer cold snap’

torayot:

selchieproductions:

and you expect them to go all ‘it’s going to fall below -45°C and it’s going to be windy as fuck so it’ll seem even colder’ and instead they tell you that it might get ‘as cold as -11°C in places over the coming week’. 

The insensitive South Saami/Northern Swede in me has a hard time not laughing.

It’s not the cold that’s the problem, it’s the fact that no one in this country knows how to build insulated houses or how to dress appropriately or worst of all, clear the streets of snow when we for once get some snow.

Yes, I think the UK deals with the cold in unsatisfactory to appalling ways.

I remember the snow early last year - it was up to my thighs, and really thick ice had formed on the ground so it was genuinely difficult to get out of my house, which involves fairly steep slopes and hills. If we had had some help it would have been cleared in good time with minimum difficulty.

When I managed to get into uni in central London, it was such a joke - it was just wet with a few icy puddles, and looked and felt no worse than any other rainy winter day. My neighbourhood, on the outskirts of Greater London, was still thickly muffled with fluffy white snow when I got back home during the early evening. It took a good week for the snow to go away, and the inches-thick, super-slippery ice remained for over a week.

Of course we did not object to getting outside and trying to clear the snow and spread grit, but not everyone can do that - furthermore, I don’t think anyone without a lot of time, energy, equipment, and manpower would have been able to actually effectively make a dent in the large amount of snow and ice visited upon us.

I think if people had stopped roaring ‘OMG THERE IS SNOW’, and channelled the effort onto helping people, it would have been generally better. It is okay to be ‘OMG THERE IS SNOW’ but ideally it should be ‘OMG THERE IS SNOW what shall we do about it?’.

Seattle is like this.  When there’s major snow, like there was a couple of weeks ago, the major roads get cleared fairly quickly and efficiently, but parking lots and residential streets are SOL because there aren’t enough plows to clear them all.

You would think, after this happens a few times, that the city would invest in a few more snowplows.