Snow daze

England covered in snow

With headlines like ‘Not even the Blitz stopped the buses…but snow does today’  in the news, I can’t help but think back to the times that it snowed while we were living in England.

It doesn’t snow there very often – maybe one or two days a year, but when it does, the country grinds to a halt – literally!  Traffic stops on motorways for hours, flights are cancelled, and even the possibility of snow or freezing rain in the weather forecast will sometimes result in decisions being made in advance to close schools. 

When we were packing our overseas container, our son, seven years old at the time, was rather upset when I told him the toboggan wasn’t coming because it didn’t snow in England.  But, the day we arrived, landing at Heathrow shortly after 6 a.m. on an early January morning, it was snowing.  Mind you, it was a very wet and slushy kind of snow, but it was snow nonetheless.  We’d left behind three feet of snow in Toronto.  We were cold and tired, and it just seemed like a cruel joke that it was snowing when we landed at Heathrow after being told by friends and acquaintances in the UK that it never snowed in England! 

On the rare occasions that it did snow in England, it was almost magical.  Snow on thatched roofs and stone walls, mistletoe and holly, it was very picturesque.  Children and adults alike couldn’t resist impromptu snowball fights, and much to my amusement, people would walk along the streets with umbrellas to protect themselves from the falling snow.  Schools would keep children in on days when there was an accumulation of snow on the ground, much like we do here in North America when it rains.  It was quite a culture shock to see how England coped when it snowed.

I did understand, to an extent, why the country faced such difficulties when it snowed.  The roads there, for the most part, are much narrower than our North American roadways.  On-street parking is a necessity in many of the older neighbourhoods, often creating even narrower or one lane streets.  In lieu of signage, many roadway instructions such as the need to yield to oncoming traffic, are painted on the roads, and roundabouts, used instead of traffic lights or stop signs at most intersections, are particularly treacherous when roads are slippery.  Snow tires (or tyres as they would spell it) are unheard of.  Add to all of this the fact that it makes very little economical sense to amass a large collection of snow ploughs and sanders (known there as gritters) in anticipation of wintry weather, when they typically experience no more than a day or two of snow in a year.

Having said all of that, I couldn’t help but be extremely frustrated when my husband and I, enroute once again to Heathrow for a flight to Belgium early the next morning, were stranded on the A1, a motorway linking the north of the country to the south.  We had arranged to stay at a hotel near the airport the night before our flight so that we could avoid the rush hour traffic on the M25 the next morning, and when the snow started, we jumped in the car to get to London before the roads got bad.

Little did we know that it was too late.  The gritters hadn’t gone out soon enough and the roads were already starting to get slippery as traffic compacted the falling snow.   Being experienced with driving in snow, my husband had no problems, but after driving for about 40 minutes, we came to a complete standstill with traffic queued up ahead of us for miles.  We were later to find out that because the gritters hadn’t gone out early enough, lorries further along on the A1 were unable to drive up and back down the other side of an incline in the slippery road without losing control so they stopped, forcing all of us, hundreds if not thousands of vehicles, to stop behind them.  From about 7 o’clock that evening until about 4:30 the next morning, my husband and I were in our car surrounded by other vehicles as far as the eye could see, parked on the A1.  We hadn’t eaten supper before we left the house and after a couple of hours I found myself, in delusional desperation, rummaging thru the storage areas in the backseat hoping that the kids had left a piece of a chocolate bar or perhaps some stale potato chips (UK = crisps) back there somewhere!  We listened to the radio, being careful not to drain the battery, and every so often we would turn the car on and treat ourselves to a blast of heat for some temporary relief from the hypothermic conditions. 

While shivering in the car, we discussed how eventually we’d need to seek out ‘facilities’, and watched with amusement as one man slowly ventured from his car, and with hands in his pockets nonchalantly, as if he was just going on a carefree stroll, he sauntered off behind a clearing in the trees edging the motorway, returning to his car from his ‘walk’ a couple of minutes later.  Almost immediately others followed his example, seeking out a bit of privacy in the shadows of the trees out of view of the vehicles on the A1.  Never in the whole time I’d lived in Canada prior to moving the UK had I been forced to get as upclose and personal with the snow as I did that night!

That adventure was all caused by about 2 inches of snow (5 cm), so when headlines today are reporting that  the country has been hit with between 2 to 4 inches of snow in most areas with some parts of the country getting upward of a foot (30 cm) of the stuff with more in the forecast, even though we’re surrounded here with snowbanks nearly as tall as I am, my thoughts and sympathies are with them. 

Stay safe and warm my friends, and stay off the A1!