Western Europe's and Britain's recent snowpocalypse and the total chaos it caused over the weekend reminded me of an experience similar to that country's recent wintry woes.
While I was working
in the dark world of tobacco advertising, I was sent on a business trip
to Bristol with a few colleagues to make a few presentations. We managed to
line up the trip for a Thursday, so we could spend the weekend in London.
We arrived at Luton Airport on Thursday morning to chilly, soggy weather – nothing unseasonable. This
weather held up through the two-hour drive to Bristol and an entire day of meetings, a
client dinner, and an evening of refinements on the presentation.
The next morning, I
groggily awoke and parted the curtains.
 |
| Bristol gets a real taste of winter. |
The city was
blanketed with a few inches of snow, which was still coming down. As I sipped my third coffee in the hotel restaurant, I watched people slip and slide
through the snow as they stared at the winter wonderland around them. Cars fishtailed as they turned, slid as they hit the brakes, and
spun their wheels with their feeble all-weather tires.
For Bristol, it was
a snow day. The city's authorities told everyone to stay home. The
trams stopped running. The client's office was closed. We held the client
presentation huddled on couches around my lap top on a coffee table in the hotel
bar for the two clients who braved the snow.
As we drove back to
London in a hired car, we saw the first evidence of the existence of snow
plows in Britain – the highway was clear, though there were few other cars enjoying the salted and cleared the
road.
All weekend in
London, the snow continued to fall. I went spent an afternoon in the Tate
Modern, so my shoes could warm up and dry out. I went from pub to cozy
pub with a Londoner friend, where other Londoners had escaped to drink liquid warmth by the
pint. I walked down semi-empty sidewalks and slushy, snowy, unplowed roads. The
only places that were reliably open all weekend were the Indian restaurants,
the pubs, and curiously, the White Chapel Market.
By Sunday, we arrived to the airport hoping the Brits had learned to handle the snow, we
were somewhat disappointed. The snowplows were struggling to keep the snow off
the runways, delaying flights. The airport personnel let us and our
fellow passengers outside onto the tarmac, unaware the flight crew was still
de-icing the plane. We shivered outside in the wind and snow, waiting to be admitted onto the airplane. When the airplane took to the air,
I clapped and a few other passengers joined in. We had escaped.
Spending a weekend in Britain during a snowfall, or "snowstorm" as they call it, is like living through the first day of snow in Canada – drivers forget how to drive, snowplows take a while to get to the streets, people discover they haven't put on their snow tires.
In some countries over here, a serious snowfall comes once every few years, so they're institutionally unprepared for it and most people aren't sure how the handle the snow. It's like our first snow of the winter on a near-collapse-of-society level.
Canadians – and some hearty American states – have the advantage of having a few more snowfalls to deal with throughout the year, by which time we've forgotten how to deal with snow again and we're all clueless about how to drive, walk, breath, et cetera.
That being said, there are few better places to spend a snowstorm than in a cozy pub in England.