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from all of us here waist deep in the snow of Sherwood Forest
Sunday, 19 December 2010 04:52 pmThe jolly wintry LiveJournal header bar mocks me, it does, what with its jolly snowman and pretty snowflakes and its gently curvy landscape under snow. (a) It's bloody hot here, and I'm post-gastric and very fragile, and (b) my poor dear mother is stuck in London under umpteen feet of snow, her flight to Cape Town last night having coincided, with mathematical precision, with Heathrow closing down for 24 hours because of snow on the runways. The first replacement flight they can offer her is the 24th December, thus neatly knocking out half of her fairly short holiday. I think that "I'm miffed" is not only an understatement, it's a fractional stab at what she must be feeling.
I hate to break it to you, Britain, but this feathery white stuff falls out of the sky approximately annually, and proceeds to pile up into pretty, incommodious drifts in a fairly predictable and characteristic fashion. It may also have escaped your attention that you're a major international hub for air travel and its associated climate-destroying effects, to the extent where flying into Heathrow always gives me chills simply because of the number of planes I can count in the sky with mine. (They're awfully close and move awfully fast and even insane amphetamine-laced air traffic controllers have to nod sometimes, and besides, the mere fact that there are eight other airborne planes within view as we circle means there are too bloody many of us and we travel too bloody often in insanely wasteful and clumsy ways). The two above effects being noted, do you think it's too much to hope that you'd have something vaguely resembling a crisis plan in place, one which doesn't involve thousands of people sleeping on the floor in your incredibly ugly and rather filthy terminals? Particularly since air travel has a rampaging carbon footprint in giant hobnailed boots, which in turn contributes to global warming and all its merry effects, such as wilder weather extremes and, for example, ALL THIS BLOODY SNOW.
I hasten to add that my poor dear mother is not, in fact, sleeping on the floor in Heathrow, she fortunately has friends nearby and is being put up in considerably more comfort. But I resent being deprived of six days of her company by a noxious confluence of overpopulation, inefficiency and climate change. It pushes all my buttons at once, with a fine, ham-fisted indifference. Phooey.
I hate to break it to you, Britain, but this feathery white stuff falls out of the sky approximately annually, and proceeds to pile up into pretty, incommodious drifts in a fairly predictable and characteristic fashion. It may also have escaped your attention that you're a major international hub for air travel and its associated climate-destroying effects, to the extent where flying into Heathrow always gives me chills simply because of the number of planes I can count in the sky with mine. (They're awfully close and move awfully fast and even insane amphetamine-laced air traffic controllers have to nod sometimes, and besides, the mere fact that there are eight other airborne planes within view as we circle means there are too bloody many of us and we travel too bloody often in insanely wasteful and clumsy ways). The two above effects being noted, do you think it's too much to hope that you'd have something vaguely resembling a crisis plan in place, one which doesn't involve thousands of people sleeping on the floor in your incredibly ugly and rather filthy terminals? Particularly since air travel has a rampaging carbon footprint in giant hobnailed boots, which in turn contributes to global warming and all its merry effects, such as wilder weather extremes and, for example, ALL THIS BLOODY SNOW.
I hasten to add that my poor dear mother is not, in fact, sleeping on the floor in Heathrow, she fortunately has friends nearby and is being put up in considerably more comfort. But I resent being deprived of six days of her company by a noxious confluence of overpopulation, inefficiency and climate change. It pushes all my buttons at once, with a fine, ham-fisted indifference. Phooey.
