RUN RUN THE SKY IS FALLING IN : Julius Caesar famously chose the winter of 55 BC to invade ancient Britain after consulting an oracle who said, chicken guts at her feet, “when the sky white is the people painted know no delight in transportation or flight”.
We know what happened after that, as Caesar recorded his exploits on an ancient Etch A Sketch that he carried everywhere.
It has been easy for historians to decipher the pictograms of ancient Britons baffled to immobility by snow, their chariots piled together, their swords stuck in their sheaths, the druids scratching their heads and tasting snowflakes. While unnoticed Caesar’s legions surrounded the haplessly snowed in Celts.
And so it has been for the past two millennia.
The Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Vikings arrived in successive waves like blizzards, but only when the people of Great Britannia were immobilised by a dusting of powder.
1066 may have had a different result if it had not been snowing heavily on the paths and rough roads Harold One Eye had needed to traverse to face the Norman army of Norman Williamson.
So too the 19th century invasion of the Sax-Coburg empire who seized the thrones of England, Scotland and Wales, never to let go.
Even today their descendants like no better sport than waiting for it to snow before rushing out into the inevitable gridlocks so they can taunt stuck lorry drivers and small traders by asking “And what do you do?”
With all this being true no one expected today. The snow. And the aftermath. Because nothing is the aftermath. The snow falls but all that is happening is people breaking out forgotten sleds and children pelting one another with snowballs.
Neighbours emerging to stand socially distanced on the white pavements of the United Kingdom, blink at each other and enquire “And who are you again?”
And the traffic hasn’t halted in frustrated and vulnerable masses of metal doom, because the trade has already ceased.
And what power could it be that has rendered the snow god obsolete?
Why Brexit of course, and Covid-19 under the management of Boris Johnson and his cabinet of loyal halfwits.
The snow will have to try a little harder from now on to disrupt and cause to cease the life and commerce of old Britannia, because Boris Johnson is way, way ahead of it.