London can't handle the snow

LONDON — One of the problems of being a nation of rain is that when the stuff falling from the sky turns out to be a country-sized, super-thick duvet of snow, well, the place comes to a standstill. This happened today in Britain.

Bear in mind, though, that this is also the country where sections of the rail network occasionally come to a standstill during much smaller smatterings of snow because the “wrong kind of snow” has fallen on the tracks.

Britain is just not equipped for snow, even the right kind of snow. I’m not sure what kind of snow this is but a very, very large amount of it fell here yesterday and was promising to continue overnight. It’s the largest snowfall in the United Kingdom for 18 years. A whole foot of snow has fallen in some parts of the country already and a lot more is on its way. I have not seen a single snow plow in the streets all day. Britain doesn’t really do snow plows.

I’m reminded of a winter I spent in Boston in the early 1990s. The Boston Globe, if I recall, featured an image of the Celtics star, Robert Parrish, on the front page every day, with the cumulative snowfall marked alongside his image, reaching progressively further up his frame. After some weeks, the snow rose over Parrish’s head. Parrish is 7 feet and one inch tall. The streets of Boston, for all that, remained relentlessly plowed and salted. But here, with the snow reaching the height of David Beckham’s upper shin, we are becalmed.

And happily so. Britons are already sick of worrying about the economy — there are worryingly xenophobic, anti-immigrant worker strikes sprouting up here and there in the U.K. right now (and the workers are fellow EU residents, with full legal rights to live and work here) — and a day off school and work seems to have cheered everybody up.

My wife and I went out for a walk in our local park in northwest London this morning and it was like living in the States again. People, you know, said things like “good morning” to me. And smiled as they did so. Usually in Britain if someone you don’t know says hello to you in the street you tighten your grip on your wallet and quicken your pace. Or you get ready to dial the local mental health emergency hotline.

“Morning,” a young couple said to us, as they rolled huge snowballs around the sidewalk, clearly building the component parts of one of dozens of snowmen we saw on our walk.

The local gym, my wife reported, was packed in the middle of the day, full of people who had clearly made no effort whatsoever to walk to work through London’s silent, white streets. Work seems a bit pointless in Britain right now, when every day brings further news of economic catastrophe. Six million workers, in this nation of 60 million people, didn’t make it in to the office today and I can’t imagine that many of them were sorry to miss another day of monitoring declining sales and figuring out how to lay each other off with a gentle touch.

Even the dogs in the park leaped around and yelped like they’d just been told that Gordon Brown had discovered a spare £500 billion left under a mattress by Tony Blair in the spare room at 10 Downing Street.

It was, in the end, a profound blessing that our local government leaders have not, apparently, spent a penny on snow plows. The country could laugh, dig out the sleds and decide that work could wait a day. Or, if the weather forecast is right, perhaps two.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/united-kingdom/090202/london-cant-handle-the-snow