Grumpy's back!

The recent snow has irritated me for a number of reasons. First because we didn’t get much. Somehow I felt cheated as the rest of the UK basked in bucket loads of white stuff, children had time off school, and, just for a brief moment, we forgot all our economic troubles.

I say for a “brief moment” because it didn’t take the economic gloom warriors long to get themselves back to the top of the news agenda with their talk of millions of people staying away from work and how much it was going to cost the country. What about the millions who would love the opportunity to trudge through snow to get to work but can’t because they haven’t got any work to go to – often as a result of the actions of our bonus grabbing bankers and the news hounds who whip up the frenzy while trying to find any number of different angles from which to view the gloom. Interesting we do seem to be having a bit of a weekend moratorium at the moment. Has anyone else noticed that? Poor mites they really struggle for a story on Saturday and Sunday and can’t wait for the renewed onslaught on Monday. Don’t for one minute think that all these redundancies didn’t happen before the economic dive. Of course they did. The difference was that 90% of them were never reported. No one was interested. Woolworths? MFI? – Both basket cases for years. What the downturn has done is allow a load of overstaffed organisations to cut out the unwanted and unwarranted staff and blame something other than their own inefficiency.

Back to the snow. Don’t you just hate the macho men who bleat on about “It’s only a bit of snow….don’t know what all the fuss is about…get on with it….get out of my way as I roar off down the to prove a point”. The roads are dangerous not just because they are icy but also because they are populated by these tossers.

Health and Safety Nutters are out in force. Yes, we do understand the pavements are icy but short of sticking a feather up our bottoms and floating above them I’m not sure what we are supposed to do. I woke this morning to the tragic news about the teenage girl killed while sledging. As well as feeling sympathy I wondered how long it would be before the H&S brigade latched onto the story and put up a representative suggesting that sledging should be banned. It was 10:30am! It almost made me want to go out with a sledge, a stack of fireworks, some conkers and a mobile telephone strapped to my ear to have some fun. Then I remembered we didn’t get any snow here!