Why does it never snow in London?

Across the UK, fields of melancholic green have been metamorphosed into wintery snowy plains: the sort of weather you always fantasised over as a kid. Deadlines have been extended, schools have been shut and days have been spent building snowmen, sledging and throwing snowballs at passing cars. 

As far south as Oxfordshire, people are frolicking in the pure white snow. A friend in Newcastle said he’d spent many hours trying to negotiate the hill-path down to the shop, avoiding treacherous black-ice as he got supplies in for the boys. Meanwhile, those of us in London have to make do without an arctic survival setting, but the same regular daily grind in a setting of modernist-concrete grey, only that it’s nigh impossible to venture outside without feeling the first signs of frostbite and hypothermia.

Even Surrey got a sniff of the white stuff

It’s like a budget Day After Tomorrow, where instead of an expedition across the East-Coast of America in Arctic Tundra, it’s a crappy commute past King’s Cross in weather that isn’t that extreme, but just damn inconvenient. It’s not like I’m suffering the debilitating effects of drought-related famine, nor is my house under six feet of muddy Cumbrian water. It’s more that it would be nice to break up the monotony of temporal South-East English weather with something a bit more exciting.

It would be alright if I knew it was only on the other side of Hadrian’s wall, or even north of Birmingham. But the fact people in Surrey, the nearby land of tennis-coaches, white 4x4s and second homes, is currently under a blanket of snow seems a bitter pill to swallow.

My back-garden…

We have all the shitty winter weather: biting winds and sleet that leave you chilled and soaked to the bone as you wait for the belated 73 bus without anything to show – or should I say snow – for it. It’s all but futile to bitch about the weather, there’s nothing that either myself, this article or the masses of dismaying Londoners can do that will change the absence of snow. But we’re missing out: I want a snowy Snapchat story, too. Maybe next year, eh?