Snow ho ho?

So, the weather update: Edinburgh is having the WORST WEATHER IT'S HAD FOR 50 YEARS. Yes, that's half a century. Thanks a lot, Scotland. I've been lovely about you and spend all my time saying to everyone I know how great Edinburgh is, and this is my reward? Traversing the streets like an arthritic snail, in an attempt not to go flat on my arse on the 3-inch thick ice? Giving myself chronic back ache by hunching my shoulders up against the wind and the threat of going flying? Reverting to the 80s by buying a snood? (Which, inexplicably, when wet, smells of horses, despite being made not even of wool, but is 100% acrylic).

All of this wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to leave the city. But my job means I have to go down to London for meetings. The last one necessitated spending six and three quarter hours on a train from Berwick Upon Tweed to Kings Cross (this should have taken about four hours). Then I had to do battle with a tube strike the next day. On the way back, we were storming along - relatively speaking - till they decided, with no explanation as to why, to kick us off the train at Darlington. Then when I eventually got to Edinburgh, I had to wait an hour for a cab. So I was in transit from 8.30am, when I left my hotel to go to Kings Cross, till 7.15pm, when I finally arrived home. And now I've found out I have to go down for another meeting on Tuesday morning - just when the weather's going to get horrendous again.

I love the way that the Government says, whenever the 'Britain in chaos' headlines have gathered enough momentum, and economists have worked out how much we're losing per day because of the snow (£1.2 billion this year, apparently), that there's no point spending money on infrastructure to avoid some of this, because 'we rarely have weather this bad'. Um, 1/ Large swathes of the country have been brought to their knees for the last three years, by my reckoning and 2/ Winter happens every year. Unless the shiny new coalition government are going to somehow rearrange the seasons so that we just have Spring, Summer and Autumn, followed by Spring again, it's pretty likely that there will be snow at some stage between December and March. Or probably May, judging by this last year.

How much would it really cost to sort out the rail network, for example? Versus how much you're losing in terms of people not being able to get to work, or spending three hours getting across London, then getting to work and pretty much having to set off for home again?

Or here's a nifty idea: why don't the Government phone up some chums in, say, Canada, and ask them how they manage to keep everything going? And then, you know, copy them? Because they have winter every year. Loads of it. And they look at our bits of snow, and our world-headline-creating grinding of a whole nation to a halt and they laugh. Not even behind their be-mittened hands. In our faces. Because we're idiots.

It's nice to have student riots to distract us from all this (and their riot fires to keep central London warm), but it will not make me any happier when I inevitably spend literally twice as long as I need to on a train from Edinburgh to London and back. And no, I can't risk flying, because I've seen what happens to planes at airports when it snows: you're left on an Easyjet for three hours, going nowhere, and then shoved back into the, now ironically named, departure lounge and left to go feral in Duty Free. I'm not risking that. At least if you sit on an East Coast train for long enough, you get given a packet containing two free biscuits. (It's a measure of how depressed we all were on that journey that we all went, 'Oh, wow, thanks!' when given these delicacies, and actually meant it sincerely).