On telly young men in North Face anoraks screech about Britain’s snowfall using rhetoric and sometimes the vocabulary employed in last week’s financial crisis. Contrapuntally, other young men, much more chic, are saying how much better Moscow and Calgary are at coping with their snow. A pointless match null weather story since no local authority south of Inverness is prepared to invest in a fleet of rarely used bulldozers or a Ben Nevis of salt. Or is it grit?Temperate Dorking, discommoded for all of forty-eight hours, must bite on the bullet and suffer. In Pittsburgh, where I dwelt for a year or two, things were different. The snow was thicker and the Democrat Machine knew what to do about that. What it couldn’t compensate for were the street gradients in the southern suburbs. Steep? Wow!
Locals carried sacks of cement in the already overhanging trunks (ie, boots) of their Chevvy Impalas. Thus when the car’s back end slid sideways in the slush the pendulum effect became uncontrollable. Me? I bought studded rear tyres for my Volvo 122S and smugly sailed up all those forbidding ski-slopes. So smug that I drove out that evening deliberately searching for the most vertiginous thoroughfares.
America knows how to punish smugness. What I hadn’t realised was that those rear wheels would play virtually no role at all when I started descending and needed to brake. The front wheels locked and the Volvo became a Flexible Flyer. Sweatily I guided the car to the roadside and allowed the kerb, graunching against the tyres, to bring things to a halt. At that point I would have been available for a screeching interview about snowy roads.
