extreme weather alert... or so they say.

It's cold tonight in Bristol - or so they tell me... I must admit that I did find it a little cooler than normal in my house today while I enjoyed my day off work. The heat turns down during the day when people are normally not home, so when it was colder than usual I figured it must have to do with this cold spell that is hitting England which I have been hearing so much about.

I managed to spend the whole day inside as I have normally tried to do in reaction to 'cold and extreme weather' warnings during my last few winters spent in Kingston when at times the overnight drop to negative 40 caused the pipes in my home to freeze. Quite honestly, my staying inside all day had little to do with my fear of the weather and more related to sheer laziness and my desire to work on my grad school application, sip tea, eat jaffa cakes, and watch the occasional spot of day time telly all in the comfort of my living room.

When housemate after housemate arrived home after work with comments like "its freezing out there", and "its bloody cold" and even "the wind is so cold it stings your face", I mustered up enough courage to walk to the shop to buy myself some sandwhich making essentials for my lunch tomorrow... under the advisements of my housemates (and partially for my own amusement) I "bundled up" to make my trek to the store. I was joined by a couple of housemates who needed to pick up a few things as well, so I knew I would not be alone when facing this terribly cold night.

It turns out that its around negative three degrees out (i checked on the BBC weather to confirm), and there is a slight hint of wind... more like a breeze really... it had to be pointed out to me before I noticed it. I decided to uphold my reputation of being a polite Canadian by not pointing out to my co-trekkers that the weather they were moaning so much about is considered balmy by most Canadian standards, and so I just casually walked to the shop with my hood down while my housemates huddled up in their jackets and covered their faces with scarves.

The good news for me is that I've realized that this is as cold as it gets. While out and about on this fair night, I heard familiar sentiments such as "all this talk about global warming, and yet it keeps getting colder every winter" which Canadians normally save for instances when the windchill comes into factor, and I had a good chuckle to myself over the fact that I now know I'm going to have a fairly warm winter.

Get back home and turn on the news - apparently a snow storm of epic porportions has hit just about every part of England except where I am, with a big hit on the north and southeast. I saw coverage of an accident with an upside down car (everyone was safe and uninjured) with a warning of dangerous roads - but what got to me, is that surrounding the accident were relatively clear conditions and there couldn't have been more than centimeter of snow on the ground. In fact I had to squint to see if there was snow at all.

In general there is widespread panic and warnings that in Canada we would normally save for the likes of ice storms and proper blizzards - but I guess its just different strokes for different folks really. Although this type of snowfall isn't that unusual for the likes of England, I assume its not usual enough to invest in building an efficient infrastructure to deal with it, which results in icy and unsalted roads as well as little to no hope for snow removal.

All in all, I've had a good chuckle over the weather tonight, and thought that my amusement would be best shared with my Canadian friends rather than my British ones, although I did get a few comments in. Words like 'windchill' mean nothing to my friends here, and when explaining them the concept of windchill and the idea that the temperature could even be negative thirty, they have no possible way to imagine what that would feel like.

Anyway it could turn out that I have spoken to soon and that I'll find this city submerged into a blizzard of extreme porportions tomorrow morning - after all, the official extreme weather warnings that are being circulated across the nation warn of "frost" and "heavy snowfall" with further accumulation to between two and five centimeters. Good god!

- Chris