You know when you truly lose your innocence when snow is a cause to grumble, not be happy.

Am I just becoming a grumpy old man? I feel like I might be, due to the fact I'm so indifferent towards the snow currently hitting the UK.

I mean, yes, we all know it's lovely to look at but look at how this country reacts to it, blind panic. Places shut down, you get cries of worry that the grit will run low. Supermarkets up and down the country will run empty of milk, toilet roll and soups in consumers over-the-top hoarding reactions. This may only be a UK thing, as we seem completely unequipped to handle any of the following conditions:

Rain (that lasts more than three days)
Snow (any)
Sun (More than a week)
Wind (okay wind can be a bit hard to be equipped against, but still)

In other words, unless its crap and overcast, the UK decends into chaos.

Can't even call it snow in this area, its just icey-power thats making my walk to work a nightmare!

No, you aren't. When you actually have to get to places and do things, snow is a bloody pain in the ass in this country.

Take tonight. Not a flake on the ground in Westminster, so even though there was a dusting in Bromley this morning, and my early morning trains were delayed, I wasn't too panicked about getting home. As it happens I had some time owing to me, so I left work early at 2pm. Took a casual stroll to Victoria station.

Chaos! Trains from Kent that were due in at 11am hadn't arrived yet, many were cancelled, including the next three fast trains to Bromley. As it happens a stopping service was leaving in 7 minutes, so I got on that.

As the train got out past Dulwich and into South East London, utterly different picture. blanket of white. Still, I thought, it can't be that bad.

Got to Bromley South, which is a moderately busy suburban station on the Kent border, not Waterloo or Victoria, but there must have been 700 people trying to get on trains going out to Kent or coming up to London. This don't look good.

Snow is driving down. It must be 6-8 inches deep. Feck.

Outside the station, crowd milling about. Bromley High Street, usually thick with buses and cabs.....deserted. Feck

I wait a while, no sign of a bus of any description. I am now totally white. Then someone confirms. No buses are running in the area....at all.

Woman beside me calls a cab company. He laughs down the phone at her. No chance. We watch a car take 5 minutes to do 12 feet on the ice. We can see his point.

I have no option. I have to walk.

I live miles from the station.

Traffic on the main road is nose to tail. Not a single car overtakes me on the journey home. I arrive an hour later wet through with a combination of ice cold snow and sweat, feet soaking wet where the snow has come through my boots, jeans ruined, and utterly pissed off.

So, no, you aren't being grumpy. Snow can go fuck itself!

Same here.

I absolutely, completely, utterly, fucking loathe snow, and I even would go as far as to say that I even dread it through the entire year, knowing that it's going to happen eventually.

As far as i'm concerned, there's no upside to snow whatsoever, and I hate every last single thing about it.

To counter the bad mouthing I love snow. Personally I see the problems we have with as more of a sign that we're not as great as we think we are than anything else. It's our total lack of ability in being prepared.

I've just been out in it, just in the back garden to see how deep it was. You'll see from my FB profile pic the sheer wow factor of it. It plays to the kid in me and I'm glad it does. :)

I wish it was snowing here... :(

We have plenty here now...I'll box you some up!

Plenty here. No buses and no trains. So no way for me to get to the office today.

We've been lucky here, apart from flurries and thin layers we've had nothing. The Mendips look very white but down here it's not so bad. I was holding my breath yesterday as a big snowfall would have settled and caused all kinds of problems.

We've had snow now. I don't want it anymore.

They've closed my building for the day and I have to call later to see if they want me to go in tomorrow. I'm happy either way. It was nice and quiet in there today but a day off is a day off!

left the house at 05:20 this morning to try to get early buses and trains to the office. Managed to find a bus and reach the station at 5:50. Told no trains before 7.30ish. Bugger

Wait around until 6:15 in the hope the situation will change. Snow coming down hard. Some buses being taken out of service. At 6:15 they say trains will now be 8:30 at the earliest.

There are now swarms of people standing in the cold.

At 6:40am they say its now looking like 9-9:30 at the earliest. And because of passenger numbers the trains may not be able to take passengers from this stop.

I give up at 6:50 when they repeat the announcement, but the 9am bit is gone. Its now 9:30 at the earliest. Half a billion people are now at the station. I see two people take nasty falls in the snow.

I manage to get on a bus and have just walked in the door at 7:30am.

Reaper wrote:

left the house at 05:20 this morning to try to get early buses and trains to the office. Managed to find a bus and reach the station at 5:50. Told no trains before 7.30ish. Bugger

Wait around until 6:15 in the hope the situation will change. Snow coming down hard. Some buses being taken out of service. At 6:15 they say trains will now be 8:30 at the earliest.

There are now swarms of people standing in the cold.

At 6:40am they say its now looking like 9-9:30 at the earliest. And because of passenger numbers the trains may not be able to take passengers from this stop.

I give up at 6:50 when they repeat the announcement, but the 9am bit is gone. Its now 9:30 at the earliest. Half a billion people are now at the station. I see two people take nasty falls in the snow.

I manage to get on a bus and have just walked in the door at 7:30am.

And this, dear friends... is why I love snow so much. (/sarcasm)

Especially here in the mid-west united states. Because when it really snows around here, it's often bad enough for major power outages, snowstorms, and completely blocking all streets and basically shutting the entire town down for weeks on end to the point where you'd think the world ended.

Interestingly enough, my other half spent August 09 to May 2010 in South Dakota. And yeah, I think thats what annoys me more about this country. They have seven, eight times the amount of snow as we do, yet they cope. They cope with the cold of minus god-knows-how-much. Over there, like Mike said, a MAJOR blizzard will knock things out. Over here the country grinds to a halt because 4-5inches of snow turns up.

In related news, we actually had about an inch and a half overnight in Wells, meaning the villages in the mendips probably had triple that and are now closed off from the rest of us. Still, managed to get to work as main roads are fine. Just thankful I'm not where some of the others are. If I don't get to work, I lose holiday.

According to some assclown on the 1p,m BBC News, the key difference between the UK and places like Scandinavia and the East Coast of the USA is that our weather is "Unpredictable". Apparently its not like that over there because "they can predict, almost to the week, when their bad weather will start".

Yes, so can we you fecking prick, its called winter! Their meteorologists watch the same feeds from the same weather satellites that ours watch. They see the same storm fronts moving in. And this weather has COME from Scandinavia. We've had more fecking warning than they have! And what's so "unpredictable" about the idea that when fecking winter gets here, it might get cold and we might have fecking snow? The BBC warned of this a week ago, and yet its still come as a huge "surprise".

Where do they get these pricks from?

I ask myself this, then I look at the riots regarding the tuition fees. Two things then strike me:

1. You really don't understand how anything works, especially something you're protesting against.

2. Thats where the idiots are coming from.

And this was a guy who was supposed to be representing the RAC. I just thought we may as well give up now.

Its nothing to do with unpredictable weather patterns, its simply to do with investment. The country won't invest the sort of money necessary to keep it going in bad weather, and while we're skint as a nation, they never will.