By Fraser Bryce
Well, it’s winter again. And, surprise surprise, it’s cold and wet. Well, colder and wetter, but you get the idea. For the past month or so, Britain’s weather closely resembled some kind of biblical punishment with the country being battered by snow, torrential rain, plagues of locust, raining frogs, hailstorms and even a tornado – not one of the epic swirling clouds of dust that tear across cities in America, but a slightly stronger and faster gust of wind that knocked over plant pots and stuff. Thankfully we in Scotland weren’t that badly affected by the rain, because our ancestors decided to build an entire country on hills. But our English cousins were less lucky, with floods becoming quite regular, and fields in Somerset looking like massive swimming pools for farm animals.
Now, I may be wrong, but I’m at least 80% certain that flooding is almost an annual event now; much like Christmas, but wetter and with no presents. It seems to me that around this time every year, the news is full of footage of rivers running faster than usual and people complaining about their shop floor getting soggy, which, bizarrely, they don’t combat with some sort of absorbent utensil, and instead a brush. This bugs me so much you wouldn’t believe.
But I’m not here to talk about that – so it seems to me that this flood malarkey is a common enough occurrence that we could start doing something about it. I mean, we don’t have any money anyway, but wouldn’t it be better if we could spend the money we don’t have on some form of flood defence? Perhaps a massive plug hole in the middle of the country, or maybe even a giant brush. It seems to work for those people who need to dry their shops on the news. Maybe we could introduce some sort of snow proof train network. Seriously, how does snow cause so much carnage whenever it decides to rear its fluffy white head? It’s actually quite impressive; drops of frozen water on their own cause no problem, but when they group together in partially frozen huddles they manage to bring the entire country to a standstill. Even the Roman Empire couldn’t do that.
Look at countries like Finland, they get twelve inches plus of snow all year around and do they complain: no, they carry on, because they’re prepared; and, if we prepared for these sort of conditions, we’d be able to function in extreme weather. Trinket stores in Sussex would never need to worry about having to dry out their porcelain hedgehogs ever again. Cows in Dorset could sleep safe, knowing they wouldn’t wake up, bobbing around in a massive puddle – wait, do cows float? That’s not important just now, what is important is the fact that Britain needs to weather proof itself if we mean to keep functioning as normal all year round. Anyway, I’ve got to go, I need to do some research into how brushes are the ultimate water defeating utensil…
