Not for snowflakes
It foiled an IRA attack, defeated Napoleon, made Bob Dylan burn his furniture -- and don’t mention the ski slope so steep you accelerate twice as fast as a Porsche. Why snow is . . .
BOOK OF THE WEEK SNOW: THE BIOGRAPHY by Giles Whittell (Short Books £16.99, 304pp)
One February morning in 1991, a white van pulled up and parked on Whitehall in London. The driver got out and sped away on a motorbike. Several minutes later a timing device fired three mortars through the van’s false roof. They sailed over a building and across Horse Guards Parade, heading for 10 Downing Street, where a Cabinet meeting was taking place.
But two of the mortars fell short, and the third only made it as far as the Prime Minister’s garden.
neither John Major nor anyone else was seriously injured.
The reason for the miss? The fact that a mark left on the pavement, telling the IRA member driving the van exactly where to stop, had been covered by snow.
The white stuff was the Cabinet’s friend that day. But is has been plenty of people’s enemy down the ages.
napoleon’s army had to retreat from Moscow because of it, the French soldiers burning their fingers as they held them too close to fires — frostbite had robbed them of all feeling.
In 1620, a Scottish blizzard lasted so long that shepherds tried to shelter their surviving sheep behind huge semi-circular walls built from the dead ones.
Meanwhile, in the vicious winter of 1963, Bob Dylan, then living in a flat in London, kept himself warm by setting his furniture alight.
Then there’s the Lauberhorn. This Swiss wiss monster is the longest, fastest course on the World Cup downhill skiing circuit. W ITH an average gradient of one in four, it literally makes you go blind — so much blood is pumped to your large muscle groups to keep you upright that none can be spared for your head.
‘Things go grey,’ says someone who has braved the run. ‘ You start to get tunnel vision.’
The holes in the netting at the side are smaller than on normal slopes, because in 1991 the Austrian Gernot Reinstadler caught the tip of his right ski in a standard-sized hole. His leg was almost torn off, and he sustained massive internal injuries that killed him within hours.
Despite the course’s reputation — or, rather, because of it — the author of this book, Giles Whittell, decided to attempt it.
His guide warned him at the top that you can reach 90mph within two seconds — twice the acceleration of a Porsche 911.
Whittell let his guide zoom ahead, and ‘ chickened’ the course’s most dangerous section. Very wise, and also a relief for the reader, because by this point we’ve come to like Whittell.
His childlike love of snow is endearing. Put your hand on your heart and tell me that a downfall doesn’t have you thinking ‘snowman’ just as quickly as it does ‘traffic jam’.
The ultimate proof we’re all kids at heart came in the 2010
‘Snowmygod’ storm that hit Washington DC. Police, unable to prevent a mass snowball fight organised via social media, did the only honourable thing and joined in.
Whittell is very good on the science behind a snowflake’s formation. First you need a speck of dust around which an ice crystal can form. This crystal always has six sides, because
of the angle between the two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in a molecule of water (108 degrees, since you ask). The crystal then falls to Earth, growing in size on the way down to become a snowflake.
This can take up to 45 minutes, which is why no two flakes have ever been the same shape — the chances of them forming from identical specks of dust and taking exactly the same path to the ground are virtually zero.
How long those flakes will keep falling is, of course, the subject of much debate. Global warming has led one scientist to predict that the world’s last big blizzard might occur as soon as 2040.
Certainly, Swiss resorts now wrap their snow in reflective white polythene, to give it a better chance of surviving the summer.
Garbh Choire Mor is a cliff in the Scottish Cairngorm mountains famed for keeping patches of snow all year round. There have been only six years in the last 400 when all patches vanished — but three of those years have been since 2003.
But while Britain does still get the odd white blanket, there’ll be fun to be had and snowmen to be built (100 million snowflakes in each, give or take).
New phrases for our language, too, as happened that week the IRA missed the Prime Minister.
The same storm presented British Rail’s trains with problems, as the unusually light, powdery downfall floated into air vents and shorted electrical components. It was James Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today Programme who called this the ‘wrong kind of snow’.