Let It Not Snow
We here in Leeds have had snow on the ground constantly from the 17th of December. I got over my instinctive "Cool!" reaction - a hangover from when I was a child - and right now I have the same opinion of snow as does the average fifty-something of my acquaintance. They are all sick of it, and so am I. It's too cold to go anywhere unless you can drive, and I can't. Buses? Late or cancelled, because if there's one thing you have to understand about the UK it's that six inches of snow really can bring the country to a halt because we usually don't get this sort of weather. The last time it was this bad was about 1963. Fortunately, in 2009-2010, most of us have central heating and double glazing and other things that make the inside tolerable, but we're on an island here! Maritime climate! The maximum temperature fluctuation I'm comfortable with is about 0C in winter to 25-30C in summer. I confess to suffering when I lived in Germany, because it easily got down to -10C in January and up to 40C in July (and Austria was even worse. I was walking around in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt in early April there, for heaven's sake). Ah yes, the average American is going to laugh at me, and the average Canadian will probably roll on the floor while laughing at me, but I don't care. I'm cold, I'm miserable, and I'm sick of snow.
And because I'm going stir crazy while indoors, I'm getting increasingly fractious and desperate. I've started reading the Writer's Block questions on LJ. Actually, these are making me feel somewhat better. OK, they're making me wish I could speak Russian, just so that I can see if the Russian-speaking world is less stupid than the English-speaking world, but the English-language answers? Constant source of amusement. The respondents seem to fall into several categories:
- People who are really Christian in the way that a vanishingly small population of the UK is. I'm still giggling at the person who screens movies for "evolutionary hints". Let me quote Charles Darwin in the foreword to The Origin of Species: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone." Oh, Charlie. You underestimated the fragility of the human intellect.
- People who I can only assume are fourteen and see the world in a ridiculously black-and-white manner. Usually, these responses are punctuated in a manner that suggests that the LJer and the comma have never met.
- People with very poor comprehension skills who don't actually answer the question, but twist it to revolve around their pet topic. These people often overlap with the first two categories.
- Female bloggers who think they're being either cool or super-feminist by dissing any and all traditionally female book genres/occupations/what-have-you. Hint: you're not, you're just being chauvinist.
- People who fail to understand the difference between rich text and HTML. Seriously, the FAQ tells you how to do this.
- And the people who write in a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. If you want to be protected from my stir-crazy wrath, write in Russian.
I'm also very annoyed because I haven't been able to meet Tchaikovsky Boy to see Avatar - he can't get down from Skipton. I don't particularly want to go to the cinema alone and I don't want to go at the weekend because it costs so much more. But I have to go. If nothing else, it will be good for my blood pressure; I need to raise it periodically because it's permanently low.
One thing I have been doing to fill the time is chess. I've decided to learn how to improve my game, ever since I got beaten by one of the Chessmaster 9000 personalities who was described as a 'beginning player' and was also twelve sodding years old. I'm not being beaten by a twelve-year-old! I did persuade my dad to join me in a game with a proper real-life chess set; I beat him handily, mainly because he a) forgot that castling was a legal move and b) doesn't know what a pin is and c) he does not have an opening book. Oh, and he also asked me which side goes first before we began - which was the point I realised I was going to checkmate him.
I've got another German meeting tomorrow, which I'm quite looking forward to - or at least I was until I realised I'm rather likely to get an email saying it's not on because of this snow. If I was in charge I think I'd ban weather in this country and make it a mild spring day all year round. I realise that this would destroy British conversation - the most common gambit for a conversation here is "Bit nippy out, isn't it/Isn't it hot?" - but it'd do wonders for the infrastructure of the country and everyone would be happier.
EDIT: I just did a google search for "Prokofiev+chess" because I am convinced there's a correlation between Russians and chess. I didn't know Sergei Prokofiev was such a big shot at chess! He played Lasker! He played Capablanca! He played Botvinnik! (Three really, really famous top-level chess players.) What a man! Great composer, entertaining writer, and an excellent chess player.
And because I'm going stir crazy while indoors, I'm getting increasingly fractious and desperate. I've started reading the Writer's Block questions on LJ. Actually, these are making me feel somewhat better. OK, they're making me wish I could speak Russian, just so that I can see if the Russian-speaking world is less stupid than the English-speaking world, but the English-language answers? Constant source of amusement. The respondents seem to fall into several categories:
- People who are really Christian in the way that a vanishingly small population of the UK is. I'm still giggling at the person who screens movies for "evolutionary hints". Let me quote Charles Darwin in the foreword to The Origin of Species: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone." Oh, Charlie. You underestimated the fragility of the human intellect.
- People who I can only assume are fourteen and see the world in a ridiculously black-and-white manner. Usually, these responses are punctuated in a manner that suggests that the LJer and the comma have never met.
- People with very poor comprehension skills who don't actually answer the question, but twist it to revolve around their pet topic. These people often overlap with the first two categories.
- Female bloggers who think they're being either cool or super-feminist by dissing any and all traditionally female book genres/occupations/what-have-you. Hint: you're not, you're just being chauvinist.
- People who fail to understand the difference between rich text and HTML. Seriously, the FAQ tells you how to do this.
- And the people who write in a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. If you want to be protected from my stir-crazy wrath, write in Russian.
I'm also very annoyed because I haven't been able to meet Tchaikovsky Boy to see Avatar - he can't get down from Skipton. I don't particularly want to go to the cinema alone and I don't want to go at the weekend because it costs so much more. But I have to go. If nothing else, it will be good for my blood pressure; I need to raise it periodically because it's permanently low.
One thing I have been doing to fill the time is chess. I've decided to learn how to improve my game, ever since I got beaten by one of the Chessmaster 9000 personalities who was described as a 'beginning player' and was also twelve sodding years old. I'm not being beaten by a twelve-year-old! I did persuade my dad to join me in a game with a proper real-life chess set; I beat him handily, mainly because he a) forgot that castling was a legal move and b) doesn't know what a pin is and c) he does not have an opening book. Oh, and he also asked me which side goes first before we began - which was the point I realised I was going to checkmate him.
I've got another German meeting tomorrow, which I'm quite looking forward to - or at least I was until I realised I'm rather likely to get an email saying it's not on because of this snow. If I was in charge I think I'd ban weather in this country and make it a mild spring day all year round. I realise that this would destroy British conversation - the most common gambit for a conversation here is "Bit nippy out, isn't it/Isn't it hot?" - but it'd do wonders for the infrastructure of the country and everyone would be happier.
EDIT: I just did a google search for "Prokofiev+chess" because I am convinced there's a correlation between Russians and chess. I didn't know Sergei Prokofiev was such a big shot at chess! He played Lasker! He played Capablanca! He played Botvinnik! (Three really, really famous top-level chess players.) What a man! Great composer, entertaining writer, and an excellent chess player.