No Snow...

"Not looking so clever now the temperature has risen couple of degrees, eh?" I remarked to the receding snow as I left the house this morning. It looks as if the tyranny of snow is finally over. Until the next cold spell, of course, when the country will doubtless be paralysed once again. Frankly, this thaw couldn't have come too soon for me. I'm hoping that with the retreat of the snow, I might feel a bit more creative. Not only do these low temperatures seem to freeze my brain, as all my energies seem to be diverted to trying to keep myself warm, but when the news is dominated by nothing but stories about the bloody snow, it becomes very difficult to think of anything else to write about. Mind you, the media had a Godsend in the form of a good old fashioned disaster earlier in the week, with the earthquake in Haiti. At last they had something to push snow out of the headlines. I live in hope that the coverage of people in Haiti deprived of their homes and livelihood - not to mention lives - will help people here put their 'suffering' in this cold spell into perspective.

Incredibly, so desperate was my local BBC news programme to come up with a lead story other than snow, they even managed to find a pretext to run the Haitian earthquake story. Now, whilst local news programmes are notorious for trying to find spurious links to national (and occasionally international) news stories in order to pad their bulletins, this one really astounded me. Tragic though the events in Haiti are, I hardly think the fact that various fire fighters, paramedics and other rescue workers from our region are flying out to help in the earthquake's aftermath hardly justifies co-opting the whole story for a local news magazine! Still, I daresay that next week they'll be able to drop Haiti from the local news as the cold spell's aftermath takes its toll. The media have already been gearing up for this one, hopefully noting that thawing snow could lead to flooding. You see - there really is no end to this bloody snow!