Cornwall's Mad Weather

Foreign people find it difficult to understand British preoccupations; concern with tea, cricket and particularly, the weather. In Britain, if you don't mention the weather in conversation at least twenty times a day, you're considered rather dull. And if today's anything to go by, weather is a most exciting topic.

Because today, the weather has been mad. Here in Cornwall we've had early morning snow, but in extraordinary combination with fierce overhead thunder and lightning. Ice-strewn roads on which to play Hirohito School of Motoring. Hail so brutal it would leave dents in the skull of Wayne Rooney. For a moment, vivid sunlight twinkling the dusted trees. But then dark lowering clouds, and snow drifting in banks across our narrow lanes.

And through all this, not a sign, not the merest glimpse of a Council gritter, a bulldozer, a tiny day-glo-bibbed man battling gallantly against the elements. Tonight, the slush which formed earlier has frozen over. Cornwall has become a skating-rink. Villages are cut off, isolated from arterial roads. I hope there aren't too many people who've been forced to try to make a car journey. Thanks to the Council's uselessness, tonight the roads here are really dangerous.