Oz kind of puts the UK's weather problems into perspective... by Jonathan Dower

So whilst Victoria state in Australia is suffering from the worst natural disaster to affect Australia in living memory, the UK has been hit by record snowfalls – something that seems to happen every 18 years or so, on average.
In the UK the news has been ‘what if we run out of gritting salt?’, ‘transport chaos’, and at the very worst, some people had to sleep in slightly uncomfortable conditions for a night.
Okay, possibly I’m being harsh – things were tough for people caught on the roads, true, and I don’t envy the lorry drivers stuck in their cabs overnight.
But now, lets put this into perspective, shall we?
173 people have lost their lives so far in Australia. That figure alone kind of makes the fact that London buses weren’t running last week seem pretty unimportant.
I know that the fires really started after the first few days of snow in the UK, so to begin with there was little other news, but nonetheless, a huge deal was made of the snow – are the roads safe? No, so don’t go out on them, okay? Do we have enough gritting salt? Umm, probably not if it keeps going for a few more days but this is the UK so it’s hardly going to do that, is it now?
What the media clearly didn’t quite get in the UK was that hang on – snow is great, we have snow like this once every 18 years in the UK, can’t we just ENJOY it without worrying about the economic affects of a day where half the country isn’t working? Yes, they might be significant, but oh well. Everyone still has their homes, their families, they haven’t lost it all, seen their town burn, been unable to help as they saw people trapped in the flames, had to flee for their lives.
Maybe it’s just not right, how significant and terrible they made the snow seem when really most of the country is out enjoying themselves… Perhaps things just needed to be ever so slightly put into perspective.
It’s just a thought.