We are doing everything within our power..

WTF ! I mean, really, WTF ??

No doubt, my little voice will be drowned in the cacophony of complaints from the blogging world, but, I ask you, what on earth is going on in Britain ?

We get a little snow and the country comes to an absolute standstill.

I am not so young I don’t remember ‘proper’ winters. I can remember spending christmas at my grandparents in Devon and walking on the top of snowdrifts which were level with the 10ft high hedgerows, That was the winter of 1982, and I’m sure my memory is faded but I don’t remember the country coming to a complete halt ?

Did it ?

I bought a Telegraph today, (much to my chagrin but it came with free water), and there were pages of howling rhetoric from columnists in there. Ordinarily I would not give them a second glance, preferring to read the newspaper in reverse from the Rugby section onwards, however, the pages devoted to lambasting the officials offered up by agencies along with their various excuses became something of a source of amusement. Worse still I found myself agreeing with the tone and line of questioning from the correspondents (see my previous post on approaching 40), some of the excuses beggar belief so I thought I’d reproduce them here for your titillation..

• “We don’t have the snowploughs that we would otherwise need to be sure of getting the roads free” – Boris Johnson
• “Snow too heavy for our gritters” London Borough of Lambeth
• “similar snow to that branded ‘the wrong kind’ by BR in 1991”
• “Our winter service vehicles are being obstructed by other vehicles, particularly HGV’s, who have not taken account of the difficult driving conditions” The Highways Agency
• “it was caused by too much snow and not enough gritters” The Highways Agency, commenting on a 54 mile jam on the M25

Even our illustrious leader broke off from schmoozing with the puppet head of communist tyranny to add weight and gravitas to his civil servant colleagues.. “We are doing everything within our power” said Gordon, which means what precisely ? I didn’t see him out there with a shovel ensuring the roads were snow-free.

I realise that we don’t have these events often enough for any politician to stand up and say they’re going to spend £X million on winter weather preparations, but surely we can do better than what happened yesterday ? It’s not as if it was a surprise, the Met Office have been warning of an “extreme snow event” for over a week now.

Whatever, it didn’t affect me, I worked from home yesterday as I often do, saving the planet by working from my little office upstairs, but the ballyhoo on the news was interesting to say the least. I wasn’t going to blog about it as it hadn’t affected me directly, until I saw this in the newspaper..

..I mean, please, someone explain to me the logic behind this ? Have we become such an HSE driven, litigious society that we close our parks for fear of people falling over and hurting themselves ?

For god’s sake, common sense should prevail here. If the paths haven’t been gritted, put up a sign to say so, then if people choose (remember these are people we allow to vote) to enter the park, they do so at their own risk. Behaviour like this continues to sustain that element of the gene pool who entertain us each year by topping the Darwin Awards, it protects the woman who sued McD’s because her coffee was too hot and the woman who dried her poodle in the microwave and (for equality) the man who died after he pulled a coke machine over on himself when robbing it.

One day I am going to move somewhere where society doesn’t see the need to protect the stupid, did someone just say “Theory of Evolution” ?

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