Snow? What snow?

It’s not snowing again. This is the fourth day running it’s not snowing again and I live in one of the most ‘badly affected’ areas south of the Wash. By badly affected I mean that all of the roads, even the single track lanes on top of a hill where I live, are entirely free from snow. It snowed for one evening only and left five inches or so on the fields; some of this has melted, some is still there. Just about enough to tell yourself that it had definitely snowed.

So where’s this icy chaos? Every BBC news programme for a couple of days had reporters standing in mufflers looking concerned telling us about an icy chaos. There was only a sort of chaos because they – and the Daily Mail’s beyond reproach ‘Kite Mark’ reportage – told us that there WOULD be icy chaos.

So Heathrow ruined thousands of peoples’ plans by cancelling a third of its flights and the railways started cancelling trains in case they couldn’t get back from where they were going. There was almost no snow at Heathrow. The bosses there allowed themselves to be terrified simply by the news reports and thought: stuff the passengers, we’ll cancel the flights. Who is primarily to blame for this fabulous ineptitude in the face of perfectly clement weather?