...Umbrella?I confess. The first time I found myself in a flurry of English snow, I opened my umbrella. How embarrassing. I felt like Inspector Gadget, calling on my helicopter hat, but instead producing a parachute. In this case, either would have been more handy.
I learned, recenlty, how poorly London copes with snowfall - and how brilliantly the people do.
Early this month, the UK boasted its biggest snowstorm in 20 years. A cm of snow in the city for each year that has passed.
It was the biggest kurfuffle. Buses were down, trains weren't running, streets and sidewalks were undiscernable. One newspaper wrote that London should look to cities like Vancouver, Moscow, and Ontario (yes, Ontario! nobody gets Canadian geography here...) for ideas on how better to cope. But while the transport system broke down completely, I think the people of London coped well. Londoners relaxed and turned playfully childish - men in business suits building snowmen in the city, people packing and chucking snowballs and chucking them at their boss (ahem...oops!). Nobody was rushed to get to work, everybody had pulled out their cameras and stuck out their tongues to capture some snow for themselves. Nobody complained (until the following day).
It was pretty amazing.
This evening, we got another flurry of snow. Nothing to panic about. We're all used to the snow now - London, England seems to think it's inherited London, Ontario's jetstream, after all. But you can tell we're just a bunch of amateurs. Out come the umbrellas.
