After more than 30 years in this country I still laugh at how unprepared the whole infrastructure is to small variations of weather. There is no place on Earth quite like England for “Middle Range” functionality. They have built a civilization that operates perfectly—provided the temperature is exactly 14°C with a light, non-threatening drizzle.
But move the needle a millimetre either way? Absolute chaos.
❄️ Act I: The Snowflake One solitary inch of snow falls in the Home Counties. The schools close. The trains develop a “fear of the tracks.” The nation watches the news as if a polar vortex has swallowed London whole. It’s not built for the tundra; it’s built for “brisk.”. There in no provision for street snow clearing and just 15-20 cm become ice which often lasts days or weeks and create endless disruptions. In the meantime other immigrants like me, grown up in countries where 50cm of snow get ploughed away overnight for roads to be used in the morning, are astonished at how a country can stop for so little.
🌊 Act II: The Sky is Falling We are on an island famous for rain, not a sub-Saharan one, and yet we are perpetually surprised by it. A few days of heavy downpours and suddenly the ancient drains give up the ghost. It turns out “Green and Pleasant Land” is just a polite way of saying “I hope you have wellies.”. Floods, and lack of defence from it, are more common than in Egypt where it rains every 4 years.
🔥 Act III: The Great Melt The sun comes out for 48 hours. The headlines scream “LUKEWARM LAVA.” The tarmac begins to revert to its liquid state, and the rail tracks start to buckle like cooked spaghetti because they were engineered for a climate that no longer exists. This obviously applies to all new infrastructures being built in 21st century, of course as they need to keep up with the British standards.
We are the goldilocks of nations: Not too hot, not too cold, but perpetually unprepared for anything in between. ☕️🇬🇧 I often think about how, a country which can be literally stopped by a mildly odd weather, could become the largest and most powerful empire in the world.