Snow time.

Snow time.

You’d think there was nothing else going on in the world.

I don’t know which is more annoying – the country-wide, pigeon-stepped chaos of a bit of winter weather, or the flurry of news reports trying to tell us this is what’s happened. Is it more pathetic that we are now apparently coping with snow even less well than we did in the 1980s – or that we feel the need to fill airtime proposing such an idea?

With the hefty homework of the Children’s Society report this week also slamming my generation for being too damned selfish to bring up its kids properly, you wonder whether to just reach for a Daily Mail and start flagellating yourself with the Family supplement and be done with it. Give in to the simple comfort of The Fear. Is there anything we can organise confidently?

Well, possibly. Apart from all the snowball fights and bon homme in the parks of London and the B roads of the South East that seemed to cheer everyone’s stress-sapped souls on Monday, you only had to catch a little of lastnight’s Comic Relief prelude to think of Britain as a sometime-genius crucible of humanity. Who else would have thought of celebrating sillyness as a way to confront some of the most brutally dehumanising experiences of people miles away? It’s very very British to do that. As British as still being surprised by a temperate climate.

And it’s a relief to have a reason to muck in and muck about in the streets with eachother.

My generation probably suffers from living in its own little world too much.

Working for yourself at home can shrink your outlook too – even as it grows it in some ways.

My list of things to do is a mix of things to get done, but it has no time for just mucking about with the neighbours. Or sitting on the pavement with the bloke in the Grove down on his luck. Or tramping the streets in a giant banana costume to raise money for him. Or getting over to my own mum’s place to finish decorating her bedroom.

Or just having coffee with friends… for the sake of it. Not just because so many of them seem to be fighting fires of one kind or another this week.

No, I have things to get done. Thoughts to get blogged. Frustration to feel, as the things I really want to do don’t get done.

The thing that cheers and challenges me, as I sip fresh coffee and look out over a winter wonderland (with Vangelis’ Antarctica filling the house, funny man that I am) is how many people in this stressed, chilly island still DO make the time to wear pants on the outside for a day or dye their hair red nose red, or chase eachother around with buckets of custard in order to help us all get serious about each other’s real needs.

I sit and wonder about that. Wonder how to get off my bloody arse.

..Though I shouldn’t think too big, right off. I should probably start with wondering how to get time for a shave and a haircut.

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