London Snow Day Creates Flurries Of Terrible Prose

After the snow day that saw half of London stay at home instead of fight the credit crunch, London’s media has had to come up with something or other to write about, presumably sat on the sofa gazing wistfully out of the window and allowing their literary aspirations to run riot. “Transformation simply falls from the sky, gratuitous and excessive”, writes Tom Sutcliffe in the Indy, presumably taking the rest of the day off to pen some poetry that even emo kids would scoff at. But he’s not alone.

NBC rolls out the English stereotypes –  ”Giving such a weather-obsessed country a day to natter about nothing else has let them drop the stiff upper lip and pick up a snowball instead” – while it also manages to get in a Dickens reference, something that the Times also does in a very silly editorial:

“The first thing to say about the snow is that it is extraordinarily beautiful. There is a joy to trampling through unspoilt snow that some children enjoyed yesterday morning for the first time in their lives. Some children built their first snowman and rolled their first gigantic snowball. The scene out of every domestic window was a Christmas card from the fables of Dickens, five weeks too late. Dull would he be of soul who would not look out of his own window and note a scene touching in its majesty.” Terrible would he be of writing who could not avoid Victorian idiom in the 21st century.

More saucer-eyed nonsense in the Indy from John Walsh, where, alongside his attempts at pop culture (Paris Hilton and Verne Troyer references, really good try) he makes playschool similies (“The leafless trees, holding globules of white in their long black fingers against a white sky”) and then personifies clothes pegs and catkins in an adorable, itsy-bitsy way:

“The clothes pegs on the washing-line, their reds and blues and yellows and greens enhanced to perfection by the surrounding whiteout, are freighted with tiny caterpillars of snow; so are the catkins, the buds and the smallest twigs. They all seem a little stunned by the turn of events – the heaviest snowfall in London in 20 years – and resigned to silent, indignant contemplation of the magic white stuff that arrived overnight to settle so insistently on their tiny backs.”

Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian sketches a (by his own admission) ridiculous portrait of a very Guardian-y London where chav and cyclist remember their “forgotten innocence” amidst a charmingly ramshackle yet painterly landscape. The Telegraph continues the theme – “Those who walked a long way to get to work yesterday found strangers talking to them. Travellers swapped stories. There was a helping hand for the elderly” – before getting back to usual editorial business by shoehorning in an attack on big government – “Six million who normally catch buses in the morning were disappointed. That illustrates the centralised precautionary policy that has overtaken us.”

The Mail’s Harry Phibbs really outdoes himself in a truly barking thinkpiece, musing first that “snow should be proclaimed by the United Nations as part of the basic human rights of a child”, before managing to equate the hours-long failure of the London transport system to the fall of the British empire:

“When the snow falls, the nation of Drake, Wellington, Raleigh and Nelson goes into a state of paralysis…British Rail told outraged commuters that the quantity may not have been too severe but that: ‘It was the wrong sort of snow.’ That phrase has lived on in infamy as symbolising the defeatist mentality of those who gave up and offered excuses at the first sign of difficulty. The mentality that lost the empire.”

And with business slowing, the FT has had to run with Onion-flavoured headlines such as “Restaurants find dining out is not essential”, while sentences like “Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race” are chucked onto the front page in a desperate bid to fill space. Meanwhile bankers sounded like they were having their own epiphanic moments as the reality of their avaricious lifestyle was brought into sharp relief by the innocence of childhood – “I got to leave work early and go for a walk in Victoria Park. It was much more fun watching children play in the snow that being in work”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country noted that it’s snowing, just like every other year.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | February 3, 2009 11:20AM |