I’m ready for the snow storm that’s set to hit I
TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD French exchange student Robin Vettier caused a storm on social media when he said French people were rude and should try to be more polite like the British.
He came to this conclusion after living in the UK for a year and working part-time in a supermarket.
When he returned to France, he again worked in a supermarket and the marked difference of people in queues was startling.
“Maybe it’s a cliché but it’s really quite true that the English are patient and polite,” he said.
Queuing, of course, is the quintessential British trait. How I missed it in Pakistan.
A Lahore travel office was so thronged I had to pay a chap to fight his way to the front to purchase a ticket for Islamabad.
Unfortunately, there was no such individual available at Rawalpindi Railway Station when I needed to book a sleeper on the train to Karachi. So I called up my British pluck, put my head down, barged the crowd and elbowed, pushed, shoved and kicked.
At last I reached the ticket office window and was about to speak, when a long thin chap in a shalwar kamiz came in sideways over my head. Two of his chums had lifted him and pushed him horizontally to the front above the crowd.
You don’t get that at Sainsbury’s. ’VE been getting ready for the Beast from the East and snow so severe that, if the organisers had waited, they could have staged the Winter Olympics in Britain and our athletes wouldn’t have had to travel so far to be disappointed.
They could even have included a new amateur category for Most Innovative Way To Go To Work for all those eccentrics who, at the first hint of white on Castle Hill, don skis, tie a snowboard to a Shetland pony or encourage a team of Yorkshire Terriers to pull a toboggan.
I stocked up on candles, tinned soup, bake your own bread and coal bricks and do not intend to leave the house for the rest of the week without packing a shovel, Thermos of hot tea, sleeping bag and flag on a long pole that can be seen above a 10ft snowdrift.
Which is a lot to carry without a car because my motor will remain at home for the duration.
Of course, weathermen have preferred to err on the wild side with their predictions since Michael Fish missed the Great Storm of 1987.
“Earlier on today apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she had heard a hurricane was on the way,” he said on TV. “Well, I can assure people watching. Don’t worry, there isn’t.”
A few hours later Britain was battered by winds that caused death and destruction in a climatic event of such severity it was compared to the Great Storm of 1703.
Still, I was taking no chances on predictions that Siberian winds would bring snowfalls not seen since 1947 by Wednesday. I have tennis rackets for snow shoes and, in case of power cuts, Googled how to run the TV by generating electricity pedaling a bicycle but realised the only bike I had was for a five-year-old. Did that mean I’d only get children’s programmes?
A two-ring camping stove is in the kitchen and, with bottled water in plastic being so dangerous to the planet, I’ve opted for cans of Tetley bitter instead.
If mobile phones eventually fail I have a contingency plan: a tin can on the end of a piece of taught string that goes all the way to our daughter on the other side of the village.
There could, however, be problems if everybody did the same.
The country would be criss-crossed with string hidden in the snow ready to trip up toboggan-pulling Yorkshire Terriers and the possibility of crossed lines connecting a lady in Scissett who wants to know what’s happened to her Tesco delivery.