I am thoroughly enjoying today's crisp feel here, under perfectly blue
skies and brilliant sunshine. Temp 0.4C ATM.

I missed the teatime event yesterday (I was still working in the basement
of an office in Central London) but I was stuck in E. London for a while
in the evening. I notice it again resulted from the classic sudden
teatime snowfall, (c.f. 30th Jan 2003) with the roads freezing almost
straight away, which was talked about a couple of weeks ago on this ng.

There's a lot of "who's to blame" talk ATM, but I do think that the
gritters really have no chance in this situation, where heavy standing
traffic forms and then the gritters can't get through the gridlock. Maybe
it's more an effect of the growing volume of traffic than the ability of
the utilities to cope.

Much more feeble were the London Tube's excuses for delays yesterday
morning: "Inclement weather conditions" and "slippery rails" (?) were two
I heard whilst waiting half an hour for a Central Line train at an
overground station in East London . There had been the merest skittering
of snow but the stations pathways were lethal: a thin layer of ice over
the whole platform posed a real risk of commuters sliding under a train
(if there had been one along). Given that the salt was available, it
would have taken one man less than half an hour to sort this out. I
notice there's an equally justified fuss this lunchtime about the icy
state of the pavements in central London, where pedestrians have spent
this morning mostly falling over.

If this is progress, give me the old days, when station staff and council
workers would have been busy salting the pavements by hand, often before
the snow arrived.

And a friend has just phoned to say that, last evening, he spent a
miserable 3 hrs at Stansted Airport (Essex), waiting for a plane from
Germany that didn't turn up. Incredibly, he says that when it "closed"
the airport turned off the heating to try to get the people who were
standing, waiting for it to reopen, to "go away". If that's true, it
strikes me as a breathtakingly cynical disregard for customer care.

Looking beyond the imminent return of more "normal" winter weather, I'm no
expert, but doesn't next Saturday's chart (7th Feb) look interesting? see:
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/avnpanel1.html

I appreciate that it's a long way off in forecasting terms, but we maybe
shouldn't write the winter off yet?

- Tom
Blackmore, SW Essex.