Ice Fever – Country In Mourning

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Not Norman’s chair

We are in the grips of snow and ice in Britain and in The Netherlands the entire population is in the grips of Ice Fever. Or were until yesterday. My Dutch correspondent reports:

Yesterday evening the complete national press gathered at the venue the Ice-Masters board meeting where a decision was being made….finally the chair people emerged with a press release; it is not going through, there is not enough ice and the temperature in the coming days is rising. The rest of the evening and night (in the media) was spent on the aftermath: the country is in mourning. Dutch airline KLM had announced it would not charge for cancellation of tickets and had been in the process of arranging extra inbound flights to get people back to the country in time, but alas. Today weather forecast bulletins are starting to go back to normal proportions instead of hours and hours of speculations about every possible scenario. BUT, computer models show the possibility of low temperatures end of next week, in the history of the tour it has happened that the preparations were canceled twice and the third time it was on, so this is by no means the end of the ice-fever.

And all to do with the national obsession with ice skating. Innocent enough.

I just makes me smile inwardly to hear news of an entire population mobilise by something which is just plain fun. That’s to skate 124 miles, touching on eleven cities, on their frozen canal system, if the ice is thick enough. For long enough. Just that. In the mean time here in Britain we are caught in the iron like grip of icy blasts, deadly roads and multiple pile-ups. Just in the county of Cumbria there were around 100 road accidents between 5.00 am and 11.00 am. That was yesterday when we had freezing rain and the dreaded black ice.

What we Britain’s mobilise around is the weather itself. What ever the weather, we have something to say. We converse with total strangers on the street about it. We complain, bitterly. We are just MAD about the weather especially when it’s life threatening. The worse the better. We mobalise around adversity. Almost a national past-time. It will pass and life will return ho hum – rain.

This is for a good friend who slipped in snow and ice the day before yesterday. She fractured her fibular. Let’s be careful out there folks.

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6 thoughts on “Ice Fever – Country In Mourning”

  1. Well, we’d have good reason to talk about the weather if we were in the Ukraine. This map of the Cold Snap Across Europe http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=77126 caught my eye yesterday. Note that the scale is temperature anomaly, not temperature absolute. In other words, there’s not much average change in Britain (believe it or not), whereas around the Black Sea, it’s as much as 15 deg below average.

    Locally, the gravel-pit lakes and river Lee are frozen, the first time that I can recall.

    As you say, take care. It’s what you don’t see that’s dangerous.

    gassho

  2. Well remarkably we seem to have missed winter up here in Shetland this year. Only about 2 days of snow and only about twice my car has been frozen over and nothing in this recent cold spell the rest of the UK seems to be having. Wind we’ve had a plenty though!

    I guess that there’s still time yet though…

    _/\_ Kevin

  3. I like that we talk to strangers about the weather. It’s not the content really that matters. It’s the chatting to other human beings.

  4. ….and as you know a colleague thinks it is a sign of our advancing age when we talk to strangers on the street… I just like talking to people.

  5. has turned upside down. Warm where normally cold, cold where it is usually hot. The link in Walters comment is interesting. After your last two winter this is a really big turn around. A bit of light, and warm, relief perhaps?

  6. were those brisk days. Thankfully. Thanks for the link to the Nasa site. At this time of year around where you are Walter there are those terrible fogs. My least favourite driving conditions. There was a multi car/lorry pile up on the M6 by Shap the other lunch time….

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