Never have I read of such total incompetence. A la DM. The need for troops and helicopters to ‘rescue’ rural people. (We already know town dwellers are witless wonders!)
What is wrong with them? If you live in remote rural places you take great care to have sufficient stocks of everything thereunto! Admissions of running out of fuel and food for man and beast after 4 days is ludicrous in the extreme.
Anyone that relies on anything but coal and a solid fuel central heating system wants their heads examining as all other fuel systems require electricity to drive the furnace, most solid fuel systems will still work on convection! Coal is delivered in the Autumn by the ton! You can guarantee that the electricity will go out, so oil lamps with sufficient spare wicks and oil are de rigeur, (yes, they are still made as are old fashioned mantles!) If you have any sense a small generator just to run the freezers. Sufficient box milk, flour and yeast and you are in business!
Equally to leave your sheep out when bad snow is forecast is akin to building your house on sand, you deserve everything you get!!! No hill farm can accommodate their stock in buildings and it is not necessary. Lambing outside is a sod of a job but anyone with any sense will build a fold of straw bales near the farm to facilitate themselves and the stock. Dead lambs are of as much use as a hole in the head! A really bad weather forecast and you bring them down before it starts! 10,000 buried sheep in N Ireland alone! Total bloody incompetence and sheer bloody laziness! Utterly disgusting. Trust the sodding Irish, too busy arguing the toss to get on with the real job at hand, they have my utter contempt!
I have been cut off for a fortnight as a teenager, the old girl wasn’t too amused at cooking on an old fashioned cast iron range but no-one went without anything or was discommoded in any way.
Here we have been cut off for a week, again without the slightest inconvenience. Tell a lie, had to cut the heat in the greenhouse to conserve fuel! At the beginning of every winter I stock up on all the basics, drugs, dog food etc etc. I always keep 1-3 months supplies in, one never really knows what shit is going to hit what fan at any time! I just find it impossible to believe that people are not a little more prepared.
Can you imagine the results if instead of a bit of bad weather there was a raging epidemic out there? And one felt the necessity to go find a can of beans or whatever? Really, it doesn’t bear thinking about! Considering that most of these types of situations are already dealt with in the Parables, written an odd couple of thousand years ago we really are appearing to be a retrograde species going into reverse PDQ! The sooner the cockroaches take over the better, they really couldn’t make a worse job of it could they? Totally, utterly ,bloody pathetic.
Totters off mumbling and cursing to plant more vegetables.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Perhaps you should stop reading the DM, Tina.
Just to put this in perspective:
“The Met Office said March 2013 is likely to be one of the ten coldest on record. So far the mean temperature has been 3.1C for the UK, well below normal. The average for the month is likely to be a little colder and the coldest since 1986 when it was 3C or 1970 when it was 2.9C.
According to the Central England Temperature record, it could be the coldest March since 1892.”
The snowdrifts were 18 ft deep in some of this hilly areas and frankly as suggested above, quite abnormal for this time of the year. So, it’s hardly surprising that this has caused chaos.
Good evening to both of you, CO and Ara.
CO, I ‘liked’ your post, not necessarily because I agree with it either in general or in particular but because it’s such a superbly crafted and sustained piece of invective that it deserves to be ‘liked’ for and in itself. In my opinion. Life’s too short otherwise!
Moving on, I do think you should cut the rest of us a wee bit of slack. Different world and different times from when we were both young. We now have modern methods of delivery of services. Admittedly, in the case of those of us who have the fortune to live in these blessed isles, they rely heavily on our living in temperate climes with a relatively developed infrastructure. Things going ‘pear-shaped’ in extreme weather events will, therefore, inevitably be an option. Doesn’t make us bad or inadequate people. .
On the other hand, Ara, I was at a wedding in Melrose two years ago where they placed me next to the ninety-five year old grandmother of the groom. She told me about the winter of 1947 when she was the young bride of a dairy farmer in the Borders. It apparently snowed every day for two months. They had to dig a tunnel from the back door of the farmhouse to the byre to milk the beasts. The milk froze as it hit the pail. Not that that mattered as they just had to thaw it in order to pour it away after they had drunk their fill.
She did not seem to remember chaos. Her generation coped.
I’m conflicted, in case nobody noticed. .
I’m conflicted too, Mr Mackie.
Very balanced response, and I have similar tales of my grandparents and how they coped. The winter of 1947, indeed, but we are now technically in Spring, and notwithstanding the difficulties in forecasting weather in this part of the world, had this been winter, I suspect that farmers would have been better prepared.
March still is winter, anyone who thinks it is not is an idiot!
Anyone who relies on the modern world to deliver anything is an equal idiot.
The more remote you live the larger stocks of everything you need. There is only yourself to rely on at the end of the day.
I can remember snow under the hedges, the remains of drifts until mid June!
4 days coal stock!
My left foot!!!
JM can’t believe she threw that milk away, butter is so easy to make.
I had to smile at Peter Robinson (1st minister for NI) patting McGuinness on the back and saying “no comment on sinn fein bringing the British army into Northern Ireland”
(The minister for agriculture is sinn fein’s Michelle O’Neill) 🙂
clip here :-
http://news.sky.com/story/1069751/snow-raf-helicopter-sent-to-aid-farmers
CO: have you heard about the idiot couple from California that thought it would be brilliant to retire in rural Montana? They didn’t make it through their first winter. They decided to ignore the locals who suggested that they stock up with at least 6 weeks worth of tinned and dry foods and have at very least 10 cords of firewood. They thought that they could live from the land, capture what they needed, and get by with only one cord of wood. After the locals hadn’t seen or heard for them for a couple weeks they paid them a visit. Both had frozen to death. On the bright side their dog survive and found a loving new home with more intelligent people.
People are such softies these days. I have pythonesque tales of the my 1963 winter at college which in them days had no central heating, just gas fires and served porridge every morning.
PS we still have drifts here too but no dead sheep
Chris, just love #6, I’m sure it’s apocryphal, but it ought to be true!
Come on then Janus, tell us a story!
Great walking the dog in this weather. The wind so cold on your face, that it hurt, very invigorating ( probably due to getting a bigger charge of oxygen in the denser air ). Also not many folk about, although I passed a chap with his dog the other day who looked as though he was in the first stages of hypothermia, wearing overcoat, shirt open at the neck, town shoes and no hat..silly bugger. “A bit like the retreat from Moscow I said cheerfully “.
Christina, from the Dept. of “If you think you’ve suffered”: it was so cold that poor old Hertford College froze up and closed altogether for the term. Its ‘bridge of sighs’ became ‘bridge of shivers’.
On a slightly different tack, but following on from Christopher’s #6, there have been 5 deaths in Glencoe this year already. Climbers who “know better” than the locals, disregard weather warnings and then put at risk the lives of the local mountain rescue people who have to try to reach them.
They should send the rescue account to their estates for settlement!
CO: one of my friends told me that she read about that in a newspaper. She moved to Montana a few years ago, but having been born and raised in North Dakota knew what she was getting herself into.
Janus: Gas fires and porridge eh! You have my most heartfelt sympathy. 1962-63 was my “Gap Year” (I think that’s the BS they use these days.) I worked outside as deckhand on the Mary B, (safety boat during the first Severn bridge construction). The ferry was suspended for a few weeks but the construction was not. The boat had no heating.
This is from the local newspaper,
Chris, #14, really? Actually true? God almighty!
An example of Darwinism at its best at work!
You would think coming from California they would have known all about the salutary tale of the Donner Pass cockup!
I wonder if the dog ate them to stay alive.
PS, We seem to get a lot die here in the high passes in the Cascades. They will try and take short cuts in winter on technically closed roads using satnavs which I presume they cannot use or don’t work properly. Under snow you cannot tell what kind of road bed there is. The roads quite specifically say on signs, ‘closed over winter, we do not rescue people until spring!’ And still they go on, and die regularly. They find them in the spring deep frozen in their cars. Idiots.
I thoroughly approve of not putting at risk rescuer’s lives to ‘save’ the mentally defective!
CO: yes, absolutely true according to her — and she is not known for her patience with lies and liars.
They were from the California coast and had no understanding of anything. A day trip now and again to the Sierra Nevada mountains to play in the snow was the most experience they ever had.
The dog did not eat them, in their eternal credit they had a few bags of dog food. He stayed loyal and was watching over them when the neighbours came. Poor dog.
PS: many die in California as well. They simply drive too fast over poor road conditions assuming that because their driving skills are adequate for the Bay Area or Los Angeles they are adequate for steep, narrow, winding mountain roads covered in ice with a drop of over a thousand feet on the side of the road.
For the most part if they drive off in those conditions they do not attempt to rescue them or even recover the bodies as it is simply too unsafe for everyone else. They are presumed dead and irretrievable and written off.
I write this from sunny Zimbabwe. Here are the average temps for Harare. http://www.worldweatheronline.com/Harare-weather-averages/Mashonaland-East/ZW.aspx
I think Christopher’s #6 amply demonstrates an argument I have been promoting for many years.
As you can see, we have a pretty wonderful climate, with no extremes of temperature which I believe is one reason why people from this part of the world have never been at the vanguard when it comes to planning. Without a winter to speak of, historically, there was always food enough all the year round and there was no need to build and maintain elaborate shelters, which is why none existed on this part of the continent until the arrival of Arabs and Europeans (apart from Zim ruins which are actually quite recent and in any event were almost certainly influenced by outsiders). From a survival standpoint, possessing a gene that was characterised by tendency towards excessive caution and planning was quite possibly a disadvantage. He who hesitates is lost, as it were. On the other hand, those of our ancestors who left Africa, 60,000 years ago, or whenever it was, would never have survived the harsh northern winters had they not possessed those forward thinking characteristics. I truly believe that this is a fundamental difference between sub-Saharan Africans and most other ethnic/racial groups. An inherent inability to plan, or at least a disinclination to do so, on the part of the indigenous people of the region seems apparent in almost every walk of life.The advantages or disadvantages of possessing such a characteristic will only be recognised at some point in the future. Since success of a species is generally determined by numerical abundance, only time will tell whether feckless fecundity will produce larger populations than puritanical abstinence. I suspect it may well do.
And quite right too!
See you are busy this morning. ‘I’m just girding my loins’ for another day in the salt mines.
ie a manic quantity of potting to do and working over some more garden beds.
Somewhere down the line I have volunteered myself to grow various veg starts. for the undeserving recipients of the community food bank garden. Being mainly illegal immigrants there are plenty of tomatoes and peppers to pot on. I don’t mind feeding the elderly, disabled and genuinely half witted but just seriously have my knife into the working parasites who turn up for a freebie. Unfortunately our food banks here in WA are self certifying, don’t agree with that at all, but dear old egalitarian WA!!
Thanks for the tale! Will repeat, regale and relish!