The mega-snowy-winter of 1963 was fifty years ago and obviously editors short of snowy ideas quickly realised that hundreds of nostalgic snowy column inches were at their beck and call. So what did they do was to to grab some recollections from us old folks. You will probably remember it shovelling it up at Middle Wallop.
The great and the not-so-good from all those years ago have been wheeled out to entertain us with their recollections. All this last on TV and radio it’s been a re-telling of the winter described as “the longest and coldest in living memory.”
I was just a eighteen at the time but remember it before I joined up. It seemed to go on forever; I seem to recall that snow was still falling into April. Ice formed on the inside of our (me and me sisters’s) bedroom window and we were forever fffffreezing no double glazing then. Eiderdowns, hot water bottles and extra blankets were the order of the day. We had an electric heater built into the bedroom wall but due to the colossal cost of running the blessed thing were limited to just one of the three bars for a couple of hours.
Mum used to put the paraffin heater in the bathroom to warm it up before our bath. Downstairs the coal fire kept us all warm .Happy times… Well, there were The Beatles getting ready to release ‘Please Please Me...’
Back then the weather forecast was a pretty basic affair. On the television there was a bloke who would daily predict the next day’s metrological happenings. This consisted mainly of him saying, “Tomorrow we should expect some snow...” Yeah? No kidding ? He had a black and white map that showed the armies of approaching cold fronts and areas of low pressure. He would push little lines of duo-tone triangles across the map telling us how cold we’d all be while offering us no sun at all.
But it was all guesswork, graphs and old-wives’ tales back then. No network of satellites zooming in on everything from hundreds of miles above; no high-powered computer programs producing accurate weather modelling; no spectrum analysing. Nope, it was the weatherman, his Stevenson Screen, a bit of mercury in a tube and a wild stab-in-the-dark.
It is all so different now and last week as I travelled from the Midlands to Dover everything the BBC Weather Service told me would happen actually happened. In fact I seemed to be continually ten minutes in front of the snow front as accurately foretold by the Beeb. It is not a weather forecast now, there is no prediction. It is a weather statement, “this is what yer gonna get and when yer gonna get it mate.”
It’s all very good but you can’t fool yourself anymore that ‘they’ might get it wrong. So I know absolutely for sure that by Friday warm weather will be on its way, melting the snow that ground us all to a dead stop at the beginning of the week and next with the floods and a few months later a hose pipe ban. Any ideas for the next meet where and when ?
Toodle pip magic away from it all
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