It seems churlish to attempt to write about anything other than snow, particularly as I used it as an excuse for not hitting posting anything of substance yesterday.
As I look out of my window now, the sun is shining and the snow is melting, which is probably no bad thing. Enchanting and childishly exciting though it was while it was falling and settling in white fluffy layers, I find the novelty of snow soon wears off when it turns to hard ice and dirty slush.
Boris Johnson seems to have neatly deflected any criticism regarding lack of preparedness with an apparently throwaway (but almost certainly carefully scripted) comment about it being the right type of snow but in the wrong quantities. While I accept that gritting is probably ineffective for large quantities of snow, I still don't understand how they could be sure that a bit of pre-emptive gritting wouldn't have helped a little.
I have an image of Boris out playing gleefully in the snow on Sunday evening, completely oblivious to a dozen missed calls on his mobile from senior staff seeking his approval to send the gritters out.
It does however demonstrate very effectively that a well-placed gag can diffuse the trickiest of situations.
I know I'm the umpteenth person to make the point, but it is fairly crazy that London basically ground to halt after being hit by a few inches of the white stuff. No buses. No flights. Almost no train or tube service. A full-on Bible-style plague of locusts could barely have been more successful in bringing our city to its knees. Overnight, Jack Frost has been more successful than Al Qaeda has ever been.
You too can play with alternative bus slogans.
I still remember the "storms of October 1987". I wonder if in 20 years time we'll still be talking about the "somewhat higher than normal but widely predicted snowfall of February 2009".
Apparently the "cost" of the snowfall is over £1bn, based on the estimate that 20% people didn't make it to work and so 20% of the country's productivity has just disappeared for a day.
That seems a little pessimistic. In that 20% who didn't make it into work, I'm sure there's a disproportionate number who on a normal day are more a hindrance than a help. You know who I'm talking about. People who organise endless meetings but deliver very little. People who trap you in conversations about the minutiae of their weekends.
Maybe productivity will actually rise because of the snow. If so it'll certainly be easier to identify jobs at risk in the next round of redundancies.
Now I'm not saying that if you didn't make it into the office you're a wastrel. Just that if you're a wastrel you probably didn't make it into the office...
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