It’s hard to believe they get paid for what they do, those Met Office weathermen and women.
On Sunday, the forecast for Wednesday/Thursday this week indicated a low temperature of minus 6ºC and a high of 0ºC. Admittedly, they adjusted it on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday – but even now they say today will have a high of 4ºC and a low of 0ºC. When I went out this morning it was 6ºC and it felt rather mild.
The other thing was the snow. According to the forecast on the BBC as recently as last night we were destined to get more snow across the UK in a few hours this morning than the Alps gets in a whole season. Well, they were close: it rained a bit.
Fair enough, some places did get snow. But it was slushy, wet snow and even the places ‘hardest hit’ (according to the BBC, which is treating it typically as a disaster rivalling the Asian Tsunami) could only show a few centimetres of it. You can always tell: cut to usual shots of violent little psychopaths – sorry, lovable kids – building dirty-looking snowmen with bits of grass and mud covering them, and sliding down grassy slopes with a few patches of a grey, sleety covering on sledges.
The best bit was a couple of old guys the BBC interviewed in North Yorkshire. One was a haulier:
“Well, me and my son can’t get to work so we’re losing money!”
Yes, when you’re snowed in that’s what happens. Except you weren’t – you just decided that a few centimetres of slush was a calamity of Biblical proportions and didn’t even try. The other was a retired chap:
“Well, I can never remember it being as bad as this!”
I’d see a doctor about that memory problem, if I were you. North Yorkshire gets worse weather than this almost every year, and even I can remember numerous occasions when it was much worse, even here in the East Midlands. It was a couple of centimetres of slushy snow, for heaven’s sake, and it’ll be gone by tomorrow.
Even schools were closed. I mean, in North Yorkshire!? It used to snow more than this every year when I was a kid, and nothing could cause schools to close (or shut early) except for very thick fog – that meant we went home at 3pm instead of 4pm to avoid the traffic (they used a building as the gauge: if you couldn’t see it from across the playground then the fog was thick enough for an early close).
Cut to overhead shot of the ‘disaster area’ – fields with a lot of brown visible, and roads with clearly defined slush tracks where the traffic has freely navigated them for much of the day.
Just look at some of the pictures here. From what I can see, the only problem is that people are idiots.
If you ask a pupil what causes a skid you’ll get a range of answers. The weather. The road. The tyres. They rarely get the answer right: the cause of a skid is always sitting right behind the steering wheel.
So when the BBC starts warning of Armageddon as a result of a few centimetres of sleet, it is the morons who have crashed who have created it – not the weather.