Snow chaos!

Well, finally—an area that handles snow even worse than Seattle: the United Kingdom.

Yes, the entire country.

Britain got “the worst snow in 18 years” Monday & the country pretty much shut down. London, which one tends to think of as more cosmopolitan than the Pacific Northwest, ground to a halt. According to the Guardian, only a few buses kept up their runs, & ten of the 11 underground lines either stopped completely or provided intermittent service.

(Note the URL of that story, BTW: snow-brings-britain-travel-chaos. The Brits’ favorite term for any disruption in any aspect of life is “chaos”. Dunno if that’s because they really have dull lives & need to bring drama to them any way they can or because anything out of the ordinary really does seem chaotic to them.)

Naturally the airports have thrown up their hands. BA (who, as you’ll recall, totally screwed the pooch on the opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow last March), warned that diversions of aircraft on Monday meant many planes would “not be in the right places for their departures on Tuesday.”

Um—you can’t, you know, fly them there?

Rail traffic has halted. The last time the UK got snow of this magnitude a British Rail flunkey explained that the trains weren’t moving because it was “the wrong type of snow”. No word yet what “type” of snow is on the rails this time, but the trains weren’t moving anyhow. Roads were also a mess.

I really hope the pubs were well-stocked, because with schools & businesses closed, there’s not much for anyone to do.