North vs South, Past vs Present

Two very different events took me back to my childhood this week.

First I saw a headline in yesterday's London Evening Standard - "Boroughs blame icy playgrounds for school closures".

This took me back to the winter I was 9, when I slipped on ice in the school playground and broke my nose (and I'd been the only one in the family with a petite nasal organ!). My parents didn't sue the school or education authority - it was just an accident, and certainly I've never wished that they had.

Then I heard that in Rothbury in Northumberland, 1,000 homes lost their gas supply on Monday. Heaters were distributed to people who needed them - but that resulted in the electricity supply being overloaded, so that also failed!! Did the affected residents complain; are they going to claim compensation from their gas and/or electricity supplier? No, they just got on with their lives. When the electrical supply was restored, people turned off the television to boil a kettle, or turned the heating off before using the washing machine. The councillor who was interviewed by the BBC intimated that namby pamby southerners wouldn't be able to cope with this!

This made me remember one very cold Christmas morning when I was a child. We didn't have central heating, so put the electric fires on in all the bedrooms, as well as in the downstairs rooms until the coal fires got going. And guess what - we blew all the fuses in the house. We had to wait, but Midlands Electricity did come out, even though it was Christmas Day. Lunch was rather late, and Mum had probably had one too many sherries; I think that may have been the year that she dropped the (cooked) sprouts on the floor - we just picked them up and boiled a kettle to pour hot water through them, and no one noticed.

When these two events in my life took place I lived in the Midlands, and although I've lived in the south since I was 10 I still think of myself as being a Midlander! Certainly I can relate to the people in Rothbury.

One other thing happened this week that I don't think would have happened in times gone by, or in the Midlands or North today, was the behaviour of the London bus drivers. I can understand their reluctance to drive in the weather conditions, particularly driving "bendy buses" which seem to have a mind of their own at the best of times. However, I could not condone them playing snowballs rather than clearing the snow outside their bus stations.