The original ‘Beast from the East’ is now a children’s TV show presenter. Let’s hope that’s a good omen!
HANGING on the back of our utility room door there’s a large purple object which, I know for certain, has not been moved in seven years. I didn’t even need the thick layer of dust and the gauze of cobwebs on its shiny lilac PVC to tell me it hadn’t been disturbed for the best part of a decade. I bought it just before Christmas 2010, when it briefly earned its keep, but it has hung on its lonely hook, unloved and unused, ever since.
Yesterday, though, I took it down, wiped off the dust and oiled its little white wheels. This morning, it sits in the hall like a neglected dog, eagerly awaiting an outing. Because, if the forecasts are correct, it will be my secret weapon against the fury of the Beast from the East. It will keep us fed and watered when and if – assuming the worst predictions come true – my car is buried under a snowdrift and, even if I want to risk driving to the shops, frozen snow and blinding Siberian blizzards will render the roads impassible anyway. Reader, I own a shopping trolley.
I bought it during the last great whiteout, seven years ago, when a lengthy spell of heavy snow made driving even the shortest distance a nightmare. And if you did manage to make it to the nearest supermarket, the car parks were packed with shoppers stocking up as if they were facing a whole week of Good Fridays, and everyone was tense and jostling for space. The purple shopping trolley was a godsend, to the point where I no longer even cared if it looked ironic or not.
It held four large bags of groceries, sailed around the chicanes on the pavement outside SuperValu, and gave me something stable to cling to when the paths were slippy. Only once did a passerby snigger: it was a young lad waiting at a bus-stop, and I hit him with a snowball. I was going to dump it last year on the basis that extreme events are a once-ina-generation thing, but then Donald Trump was elected and started raving about the size of his nuclear button, and it seemed better to be safe than sorry: From what I remember of The Day After, nuclear conflagrations play merry hell with the traffic.
The Beast from the East, as this harsh weather front has been nicknamed, comes with suitably unnerving echoes of Cold War-era menace. Just as the weather began to look decidedly spring-like, with daffodils and crocuses sprinkling the landscape, and it was almost time to think about turning down the radiators, along comes a sneak attack launched from the Ural Mountains. The real-life Beast from the East was 7ft 2in Russian heavyweight boxer Nikolai Valuev, who fought Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield in his day and had tiny, close-set eyes in a skull the size and shape of a boulder. These days, though, Nikolai is the presenter of a popular children’s television programme, a little factoid that some sceptics might see as an apt metaphor for our own supposedly fearsome visitor: We’ve been threatened with a monster, but it might just turn out to be a pussycat. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all. Just last month, we were warned of heavy snow and serious disruption, but apart from a slight dusting on our cars next morning, the whole country didn’t actually grind to a halt. Not surprisingly, then, there’s a degree of hesitation about battening down the hatches and unearthing the snow tyres and shoe grips that we all bought back in 2010 just yet.
Warnings
And, arguably, we have a tendency to overreact to the sort of weather events that other European countries take in their stride. The lightest smattering of snow seems to close Dublin Airport, shut the country’s schools and turn the M50 into a car park. All sorts of events are cancelled at short notice, sports fixtures are called off, court sittings deferred, driving tests rescheduled, medical appointments postponed, meetings abandoned. And afterwards we bitch and moan for ages about how much we overreacted, how the children didn’t need a whole week off school, how there really was no threat to air safety and how people could easily have made it to their hospital appointments or played their sports or done their driving tests. We work ourselves into a right state, so we’re told, over the sort of sleet showers that pass for pleasant summer weather in Ukraine.
Popular wisdom now has it, for example, that our response to Storm Ophelia was completely over the top. It was just a bit of a high wind, not Armageddon, but we acted as if the end of the world was truly nigh. Never before had there been such a complete shut-down of public and private businesses, nor such an alarming level of caution against any journeys, not even just the unnecessary ones, that were at all avoidable. We were warned to keep off the roads, stay in our homes, close factories, secure doors, make arrangements for ourselves and our families to be indoors during the worst of the storm, and wait for it to pass. Most of us followed the advice and, afterwards, some folk felt a bit foolish for having barricaded themselves into their homes when all they saw through their secured and bolted windows was a stiff breeze.
But the reality is that three people died during Storm Ophelia. For one reason or another they were out on the roads when the worst of the winds hit, and they lost their lives in accidents directly caused by falling trees and cables. So we really need a reality-check about the Storm Ophelia precedent: It wasn’t an example of our tendency to panic at the first whiff of inclement weather. On the contrary, it was proof of the wisdom of heeding weather warnings and, however improbable the extremes they threaten, acting on them. If three people going about the most ordinary of tasks were killed that day, imagine the casualty count if the Met Office had understated the dangers and left it up to schools, firms and individuals to decide their own levels of risk.
It may well be that, by the end of this week, the Beast from the East will have turned out to be just about as scary as a kiddies’ television presenter. We may well be looking back on the Met Office warnings and wondering what all the fuss was about. But if it does prove to be as bad as 2010, or even the blizzards of 1982 as some predictions had it yesterday, then we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Weather forecasting is a sophisticated science but not always an exact one – weather fronts change as they cross continents, they downgrade or they gather force, and the best the forecasters can do is keep on updating us and give us their best estimate of the effects we can expect. We’re being told, right now, to avoid unnecessary journeys, check on old folks, take care on the roads where trips are unavoidable, keep an eye out for pedestrians and cyclists, and prepare for disruptions – all good solid advice whatever the weather.
This is probably winter’s last gasp, this year – until St Patrick’s Day, obviously, for which it always saves its bitterest sleet to empurple the bare legs and thighs of shivering majorettes from deepest Alabama. But it’s almost time to emerge from hibernation and to put away the woollies, the briquettes, the hot chocolate and the box sets, so make the best of it while it lasts.
We are lucky to be blessed with a variety of seasons, often in the same day. And if we do overreact to snow, just a little, it’s because we’re fortunate enough to have a climate where it is rare. Unlike some of our European neighbours, our household essentials don’t have to include harsh weather provisions, so it’s a novelty to find ourselves digging out the items that haven’t seen the light of day in years, like the snow tyres, the shoe grips, the bags of salt and, for those with absolutely no sense of shame, the purple shopping trolleys.