Counting the cost of snowfall

Like most people living in the south-east of England my plans for 2 February were shot the moment I pulled open my curtains. Any notion of driving 120 miles through Kent, Essex and Suffolk for a journalistic assignment could be immediately discounted. There were no trains to take my daughter to school but then the school was closed anyway. There were no buses to get my son to work either. Only my partner, whose office is within walking distance, made it to work that day.

Frustrating certainly, but I was fortunate in that I’m all geared up for working at home and often do. So, resisting the temptation to grab a teatray and join the kids for some fun in the local park, I pounded the keyboard with only Radio 4 for company.

There was a crushing inevitability about the way the day’s events were reported. Why does it take just one fall of snow, accurately predicted four days earlier by the Met Office, to bring London to a standstill? How could London’s buses, which, as everyone kept saying maintained a service during the height of the Blitz, fail to get out of their depots? Where was the grit? Where were the snowploughs? Why are we all so useless?

Then the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) announced that this ‘extreme weather event’ was going to cost the country £1.2bn, a figure that made me blink until I thought about it a bit. Clearly there would be a cost to the economy but could it really be that much?

It didn’t take long to find out that the FSB’s figure had been widely extrapolated from Bank Holiday data and failed to take into account any number of relevant factors. Like the fact that many people, like me, were able to work from home. Or that many purchasing decisions would simply be delayed by a day or two. Or that those in the business of vehicle repairs were going to have a lot more work.

Popping out to buy a newspaper – a five-minute walk – I saw three cars whose drivers were clearly not used to handling their vehicles in these conditions. It rather reinforced the point that London mayor Boris Johnson made about 12-tonne buses becoming lethal weapons.
But just getting outside and away from the recriminating postmortems on the radio was a tonic. You would have had to have a heart of stone not to have enjoyed the sight of kids and adults building snowmen, chucking snowballs and using anything they could lay their hands on – estate agents’ boards were much in evidence – as makeshift sledges.

For any Londoner under the age of 20 this was the biggest and best snowfall they had ever experienced and the sense of wonder and fun was palpable. Just for a few hours people stopped worrying about the recession (depression?) and got on with enjoying themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to so many strangers in my life.

We’re just beginning to see the economy in broader terms than figures and finance, to understand the role that wellbeing plays, something the FSB clearly failed to recognise. £1.2bn? I reckon it was worth every penny.