'snow fun

The freezing weather is obviously starting to affect people's thought processes. I just heard an AA spokeslady on Sky joking about how long its members were having to wait for help from the AA, because of the large number of callouts triggered by the exceptional weather. Just a couple of days ago the head of the AA, Edmund King, was castigating local authorities for not having enough grit or road salt on hand when the crisis began. Well, Edmund, you petrolheaded dolt, it's for the same reason that your illustrious organisation doesn't have enough vehicles to save your members from freezing by the roadsides when they break down. It simply doesn't make sense to prepare for once-in-a-generation events, especially when they're not really life-threatening. (Most media reports are suggesting this is the worst winter in the UK since 1962-63. My 90-year-old neighbour says he remembers nothing like it since 1947).

The whole gritting debate is nonsense anyway. In the first place, road salt is only effective down to temperatures of about -10C, so most of what's been scattered on the roads in Scotland and the north of England was never going to work. Second, countries that have serious amounts of snow only use grit at the start of a storm, to slow the rate at which the snow accumulates on the roads. Once the snow is down, they use ploughs to clear it. You only have to plough a road once after a snowfall, whereas if you persist in chucking grit about, you have to do it every day, because the road never really gets clear.

Although there are only 460 snowploughs in the UK, many gritter trucks can be equipped with blades, but I haven't seen much sign of that happening. And as for the US approach of fitting other public service vehicles, such as garbage trucks, with blades so that they can be used as snowploughs, forget it -- not least because in most parts of the UK, refuse and recycling collection has been privatised, so there's no way the local authorities can use the vehicles.

Lastly, a personal anecdote. This morning I took a short walk out to the postbox, along entirely ice-covered pavements. On the way I passed a house where the householder was chipping the ice off his driveway, putting it into his recycling box, shoving the box out onto the pavement and dumping the ice next to the footpath! In Canada and the US you can be prosecuted for failing to keep the public walkway outside your home or business clear of ice, so goodness knows what they'd make of this gent.