General Chat

Oh Teresa, how I agree! I get so sick of people 'moaning' about how this country comes to a standstill, when other countries don't. Well, actually they DO! Or parts of them do! We can't always expect to travel 'freely' these days - the roads are running at such high capacity, it doesn't take much to cause gridlock.

WE have loads and loads of snow
but its not stopped me doing anything i normally do
though its very very cold you just get on with it

I hear so many people moaning about ‘a little bit of snow and the whole country stops! It never used to be like that.’

But how many of us have notice just how much life has changed since the days when snow didn’t stop us?

For instance, school closures. We can all remember still going to school through feet of snow, the coal or wood burning boiler would keep us all warm, though I do remember sitting in a classroom in hat, coat, scarf and gloves. So what changed?

Well for one, teachers do not live near the schools these days. At my primary school, the headmaster actually lived in the school, at my secondary, he lived just down the road. All the teachers lived in the village or at worst, a couple of miles away. No commuting forty or fifty miles for them, so road closures simply didn’t affect them.

The knock on effect of school closures is that many can’t go to work because they have to be at home to take care of the children who would otherwise be at home, or can’t get them to childcare facilities. When I was young, mums were more often at home anyway, so that wasn’t a problem.

We didn’t travel miles to the next town to shop at the biggest supermarkets, we shopped locally, walking there, lugging the shopping back, probably several times a week.

What about people getting to work. Well believe it or not, most people lived near their work, commuting miles every day, either by road or public transport wasn’t usually done, they could actually trudge through the snow and ice and get to work anyway, regardless of the road closures.

So the reason the country comes to a standstill is that we expect to travel to wherever we work, we expect to be able to carry on through all weathers, and are shocked when we find that we have forgotten, as they just said on the news, that nature is more than capable of overwhelming us.