Why Can't We Cope With The Weather?

So it snowed overnight, and has continued to do so most of the day and into this evening, and this is apparently the most snow that has hit London for 18 years. Most of the buses are off the road and schools are closed; Boris Johnson has said there will be no congestion charge today. I have noticed the lack of aircraft around because the house is either under the flight path for aircraft going in to Heathrow, or if aircraft are landing at Heathrow from the west then it is aircraft from London City Airport that overfly the house.

Questions have been asked about why we were so badly prepared even though we have known for days that this weather was coming. It seems that we have become a nation that gives up at the slightest bit of bad weather. It wasn't like this in the past. I am old enough to remember the Winter of 1962-63 when London suffered pea-soup fogs in November and December and then it snowed on Christmas night so that we woke up to deep snow on Boxing Day, and it snowed and snowed and snowed.

We went to school each day during the fogs that were thick enough that you were unable to see much more than an arm's length ahead. I don't remember us not going to school each day once the Christmas holidays were over. We lived about a mile away from my primary school and I had to cross two major roads to get there. Wellington boots were the order of the day with shoes in the ubiquitous shoebag carried over your shoulder, so that you had something to change into once you got to school. The school was housed in a group of Victorian buildings and each of the classrooms had a coal fire which provided the heating for the room.

I had a bike that Christmas and I wasn't able to use it until about Easter. The snow stayed for weeks, and trees in the local park were coated in white and seemed much larger than they really were because of the layers of snow. Yet with all this bad weather I remember buses running and cars on the road and people went to work because that is what you did.

So why can't we manage it today?