he’s behind you
Forget your magic-carpet trip to Aladdin, cancel your Snow White & Her Seven Midget Lovers’ tickets and don’t even think about blagging a freebie at Cinderella’s Ball. Oh no, for this year’s pantomime just switch on the goggle-box and tune into our authorities annual inept and hysterical approach to the inclement weather of the last week or two. Planes, trains and automobiles writ large.
Yes, I accept it’s been bl**dy cold and the snow did come a little earlier than usual but does it always have to end in the same manner, could we not just plan for the eventuality a little better? No. The bad news is planning costs money and, as we are all painfully aware, there ain’t a lot of that about. Grit and road salt is bulky, difficult to store (as it needs to be covered otherwise it dissolves) and expensive to distribute to the places it’s actually needed. An act of God is exactly that and needs to be accepted.
What we could have done with however is a bit more of Nelson’s ‘Britain expects’ spirit. It mortifies me that schools appear to close down at the merest drop of a (snowflake) hat, that hospital services grind to a halt, that Royal Mail suspends deliveries for four days and that railway staff appear delighted to hide behind cancellation signs. At the risk of this becoming a ‘public sector’ rant, or at least an overly-bureaucratic one, schools should be made to stay open and teachers’ travelling to lessons should be seen as an essential journey. For all my love of ‘postie’ he could do well to learn from the likes of FedEx, DHL and UPS whose vans still plied their trade the length and breadth of the country. From where I was sitting it appeared that the usual suspects were the first to keel over and play-dead in the face of adverse conditions. Is it because there is no recourse to these actions?
Here’s an interesting thought – contemplate today’s likely reaction to those monumental events that helped mould and shape our collective British psyche: Dunkirk, Trafalgar, The Blitz, the rebuilding of London after its Great Fire, Waterloo, Walter Raleigh’s sinking of the Armada, Cromwell’s new model army triumphing, Magna Carta, the industrial revolution, Kevin Costner playing Robin Hood. ‘Elf and safety be damned!
