Coldest spell in Wiltshire mocks at Al Gore

Just when you begin to believe that there is no God, the skies open and a thunderbolt strikes you in the chest but keeps you alive to hear a pronouncement from the clouds saying “I am that I am, foolish mortal. Those who doubt shall suffer rout and this thunderbolt’s a mere warning, the next will be a boot where it hurts!”

That is of course just a way of speaking. What I meant was that just as I was beginning to believe the propaganda I read day after day for global warming, the coldest spell for 50 years hits England where I am — stranded in Dairy Cottage in a valley in Wiltshire, the home of Vidia Naipaul where I was visiting for two days before waking up on the third with a foot of snow on the window sills, the valet around white and the roads clogged to impassability.

The snows will get heavier, the roads will be more impassable, the airports and railway stations will freeze and cease operation and the only sound of traffic will be the beating of the fans of emergency ambulance helicopters winging their way to the sick.
We, which means I and Nadira (Lady Naipaul) only realised that there was a deluge coming when we went yesterday to a supermarket to pick up a packet of dumpling mix for the evening’s stew I offered to cook.

The supermarket was being stormed as though it were the Bastille in 1789. The aisles were clogged with trolleys and yummy-mummies with their brats, the queues at the
checkouts were more thronged than an al Qaeda march in Bradford. And this was sleepy Salisbury!

So what was going on? The assistant at the checkout told us that there had been a two week snow alert and these good citizens from the outlying villages of Salisbury had flooded in to stock up on food in case they were snowed in and starved to death. “Stupid British panic,” said Nadira and we paid for our dumpling mix and a few bottles of cider and drove back to Dairy Cottage. The others, it appeared, were stocking up for the siege of Stalingrad.

I was to be driven to the railway station the next morning to get on with life in London, but it was not to be. The snow fell even as we, oblivious, slept putting paid to this year’s global warming predictions. The polar bears would be walking off their floes and surveying their iced Arctic winter wonderland. Al Gore would be discussing prospects with his bank manager.

We woke up in Dairy Cottage and counted the bags of flour, rice, daal, the cans of sardines, the servings of frozen fish, cauliflower, corn, peas in the freezer, the cartons of milk in the cupboards and the wine in the cellar. We concluded as Robert Clive did that we could withstand a long freeze.

The last time I was thus stranded was in a flat in Lokhandwala in Mumbai some years ago when myself, two friends and my Nepalese-man-of-several-trades Ganesh, were gheraoed by the monsoon flood waters that followed two days of torrential rain.
With no way out of the building or down the streets and no markets to go to we took an inventory of the number of chappatis we could make, the servings of daal and rice and the absolutely necessary supply of onions in the basket. The four days of the flood were passed in a heroic spirit of survival.

Only on switching on the TV did we see that the floods had caused fatal landslides and traffic disasters elsewhere in Mumbai and had been the occasion of real heroism, sacrifice, charity, concern for others and stoicism from the citizenry of the city.
I shall now turn on the British TV news and will no doubt find reports of the same tragedy and sacrifice here and now in the unexpected, unforgiving snow of Wiltshire. Then I shall twitter Al Gore.