My prediction is for more school closures (From Worcester News)

My prediction is for more school closures

BY the time February arrives, everyone has become utterly sick of the British winter.

My prediction is for more school closures

Cold and damp, overheated offices and homes, the feeling of being constricted by too much clothing… you can see why the better-off leave these shores for sunnier climes once the leaves start to fall.

As we learnt to our cost, this year’s chilly season reminded us of the true nature of the darker months that can be endured in this draughty archipelago we call home.

However, I think this year’s experience may only be a foretaste of shivery things to come.

There’s a theory that cold water from melting ice sheets in the Arctic will push the Gulf Stream further south.

With no warm tropical bath to insulate us, this would mean that British winters could become what they should have been all along – on a par with Canada or North America.

This being the case, we may actually have to take another look at our reactions whenever the seaweed in the hall starts to curl at the edges.

At the moment, the knee-jerk response is to shut everything down and award ourselves a holiday.

Strangely enough, this vacation is always taken in the very environment we have allegedly tried to escape…sledging, snowballing and building a bigger snowman than the one next door.

Actually, I shouldn’t say “we” because quite a few of us try to carry on. For example, apart from rubbish disposal, vital services keep going. After all, they have to – but if the police, fire and ambulance service can slog it out, why can’t other workers?

Unfortunately, health and safety culture now dominates all official thinking.

And the nurseries – literally – for this pitiful, defeatist mentality are the schools, where people who haven’t joined the real world indoctrinate their young charges into following suit.

Nevertheless, it will have to change in the future, for an increasingly fickle Mother Nature may be on the brink of inflicting a big freeze on us along the lines of 1962-63.

The signs are all there.

This winter’s experience may merely be a rehearsal for something far much worse at some stage in the near future.