“A blizzard is a severe weather condition characterized by low temperatures and strong winds (greater than 35 mph) bearing a great amount of snow, either falling or blowing. ”
or
“A bit of snow on a slow news day” e.g. Guardian “Saturday February 10, 2007 10:08 AM Blizzard hit Britain awoke to the big thaw on Saturday”
Or according to the BBC weather site “2-5cms falling and locally 15cm over high ground” and “Strong easterly winds gave blizzard conditions over the Brecon Beacons.”
Hardly worth mentioning then.
Whilst the majority of the uk did not have a lot of snow a considerable amount of snow did fall in Wales and in the West Midlands in conditions that could technically not be described as blizzards due to the lack of wind but were very poor weather conditions.
A newspaper goes over the top in its report.
Hardly worth mentioning 😉
Probably so.
I suppose what bugs me most is the huge waste of money which is BBC News 24, which seems to comprise the 24 hour long recycling of a few minutes of real news and a load of fatuous gibbering from a bunch (gaggle, flock, herd what is the appropriate collective noun?) of reporters who have descended on wherever for the day’s story.
did you have enough coffee chris? just thinkin gof your welfare, but I am def grumpier when not had enough coffee [or when shortlisting for 12 hours solid for the dreadful MTAS site.
*giggles with helen* *nods with Tim* *pokes Chris in ribs and reminds him of his very similar rant about whether an iPhone constitues news*
So let’s think…..how many mobile phone models have been released in the last ten years……a thousand plus?
So times that parts of county get more than a dusting of snow in the last ten years…..once.
I am trying to recall all the complaints of the news reporting the hottest day of the year EVERY summer.
Hottest day of the year “so far” is a good one. They can fill air time with that several times a year.
What is really getting up my nose is the fact that we are paying huge amounts of money through the licence for some twat and his/her camera crew to go and stand in some field and then hourly report back, at great length, on News 24 that they have precisely nothing to say.
I also object to the erosion of the English language.
What are they going to say when there really is a blizzard?
I hate that “crisis” has been repurposed to mean “minor problem”.
Chris, it was a minor weather related drama. It wasn’t a weather related crisis worthy of hours of news coverage. Had one solitary meaningful thing happened that day elsewhere, it wouldn’t have been worthy of coverage. The best welsh hill they could find at the height of the worst of it was still mainly covered in grass.
4 years ago – and i know, because i know what house i was living in and we only lived in it for 8 months, this part of the country had enough snow, fast enough and with enough low temperatures, that people got stuck on the M11 and A1 for the entire night. We lived just off the A1 then, in Yaxley. Max happened to have taken the car to work, because it was snowing lightly in the morning and he got stuck in nearly 4 hours of traffic just to do 6 miles because people actually couldn’t get off peterboroughs parkways and down on to the A1. People spent the entire night on the motorway, freezing cold in there cars because it was so surprisingly dramatic and they weren’t expecting to need gearing up for it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2714067.stm
Had this weeks weather been even remotely similar, this house would have had exactly the same jam going past the end of the road. And it certainly didn’t. In fact, had i needed the car, Max would still have cycled to work on Thursday. I know it was different in other parts of the country, but it wasn’t THAT different. We knew it was coming, the roads were gritted and we got a few inches of winter snow.
2003 was worthy of significant news coverage, particularly as it went on long enough to mean some elderly folk were struggling. And i’ve just searched through the bbc archives and found links to reports of heavy snowfalls in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 too but i won’t link, cos it will go into moderation. All of which, i suggest, points to the fact that we have in fact had more than “a light dusting of snow in the last 10 years” – sometimes significiant effort has been required, sometimes severe weather warnings, sometimes it is more than justified that people should stay home/keep the kids home/ check on relatives etc etc etc
2-4 inches of snow, which melted in 24 hours and caused no actual major disruption or loss of life anywhere in the UK, so far as i know, though admittedly i did give up reading/looking at the news, is really no justification for a media frenzy.
In fact, i’ve got a feeling that on a different day, you might have expressed the same view 😉
That’s you told then, Chris. :rofl:
It would be *if* Merry was actually using facts in her argument or had read what I had written.
That is just nitpicking.
For the sake of dealing with further arsiness when i’m feeling less than “tolerant” – “whatever” *shrugs*
I’m assuming the fact that i watched a queue of people at the end of my road sit in their cars for hours when the A1 was shut due to snow in 2003 doesn’t count as a fact then.
Feel free to patronise at will.
Y’all having fun now then ? 🙂
‘Feel free to patronise at will.’
Excellent. But I won’t do it here I’ll do it on my blog.
I learned this week that there was a day in 1930 when there was no news, and rather than making some up, as they seem to now, the BBC just said, “There is no news,” and played piano music for ten minutes.
Do you think such an approach now would make BBC News 24 unsustainable?!
If there were no news they would just make some up. Or you would have twenty four hours of news reports form on location teams interviewing people for their reactions to the lack of news.