Brrrr.

Only one thing has happened this week and that’s been the weather. A tabloid newspaper (take your pick) always predicts a icy spell just when we least expect it and usually they prove to be thoroughly wrong. But this time, rather refreshingly, all the weather bods were spot on. Along came a shit load of freezing gulag air from Siberia and lo and behold everyone froze their bits off.

To say that we can’t cope in cold weather is to inflate understatement beyond measure. In many senses it would be best if there was a martial lock-down in the event of snow. People, especially stupid people, should be boarded up in their homes and shot if they try to leave because it’s always the thickos that fuck it up for everyone else. It’s the pointless dick that tries to drive to work in a snowstorm or grab a drive-through KFC in a blizzard that ends up crashing and then we get the inevitable scenes of traffic that has ‘ground to a halt’.

Because of cold weather we have people willing to take a risk, which ends up with them stranded in their car at 3 in the morning while traffic officers ‘attend the scene’. I for one have never had to try to sleep overnight in my own car just because I thought I was smarter than the weather. Of course I can imagine it’s no fun at all. I wouldn’t dare try to sleep because I’d be afraid I’d never wake up again. I’d be cursing my own daftness for not leaving that blanket in the boot. I also be cursing my stupidity for not always keeping a bottle of rum and a packet of cigarettes in the passenger foot well. Drivers side, in case you were interested. I’d be wishing I’d stayed in bed that morning and given ‘the wife’ an extra kiss before I left and wondering why I was so incredibly fucking stupid going out in bad weather that everyone had just described as ‘unprecedented’ a thousand times.

Personally I’ve never been caught in that kind of scenario because (and you may disagree) I am not a fucking moron. At least not that much of one. I support the idea that if someone goes against all logic and tries to go somewhere in ‘treacherous conditions’ for a reason other than an emergency then they should be left to their fate. Why piss money (police, NHS, helicopters etc) up the wall trying to put out an inferno of knuckle headed fuck monkeys? There is no cure for idiocy so why try to find one? Save it and spend it on the elderly or something.

So we’ve all be very cold and someone really clever came up with the name ‘beast from the east’ because it rhymes and looks good on the front of the newspapers and well done you etc. Yes, it’s been miserable, and no-one seems to have had much fun but there is one upside and that’s because most of the other irrelevant news which bloats our lives has been buried under a thick layer of decaying slush. When it’s this cold everybody stops caring about taxes and historic sex allegations and autism and bloody, fucking Brexit and instead just get on with the business of keeping warm and safe and counting what few blessings they have left.

Er, that’s it really. I was going to write about The Rolling Stones and then I was going to write about Nuneaton but instead I’ve gone for a hastily written (as you can probably tell) blast of icy, profanity venom because if there’s one thing that depresses me more than freezing temperatures and heavy snow it’s the way other people act when it happens. We live in Britain, stuck out on the edge of the north Atlantic and, like the rest of the world, only just starting the reap the rewards of totally screwing up the atmosphere by pumping all our shit into it. The best thing to do in weather like this is to cancel the news and shut the curtains. Doing anything else just isn’t worth the bother.

G B Hewitt. 03.03.2018