The country comes to a halt

Monday January 21
A few inches of snow, falling as dry, powdery stuff that would not make snowballs, has fallen. The trees are white and feathery, telephone wires heaped up with it and sagging closer to earth. Thousands of schools across the country are shut, and workplaces sending people out into the park to go sledging.
If you are reading this from a different country, do not smile, we are not really so stupid that we cant deal with a bit of snow. the secret truth is, we do not want to. We don’t want to get snow chains, we don’t want to heat the motorways or sort out the railways the roads and the grit supplies. Why would we forgo, this our intermittent Narnia-time; the annual outbreak of impromptu snowmen springing to life on a dull Monday afternoon, the whistling of uncontrollable sledges down the steepest, newly-smooth slopes, the judder of wellies in slush, the sloppy ping of snowballs, the laughter, the fun? Made all the more intense by the knowledge of where you would normally be on a Monday afternoon. Who in their right mind would give these pleasures up?