Stu Hall's Letters From Canada #4

I have been living in this country for four years now, and there has been a perpetual bogeyman hiding in the shadows. I’ve never seen him. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced anyone has seen him, but he must exist because people whisper about him all the time. Who is this bogeyman? No, it’s not Prime Minister Harper. I’m talking about a bizarre meteorological event that Wikipedia describes as, “raindrops [that] become supercooled while passing through a sub-freezing layer of air … [that] freeze upon impact with any object they encounter”. It has a METAR code. I don’t know what a METAR code is, but it has one. I am talking about “freezing rain”. No, no. Not hail. It’s different to that (and hail has it’s own METAR code). No, no. It’s not sleet. No, not black ice, either. It’s “freezing rain”.

Let’s back up a bit. British people are well known for talking about the weather, but Canadian people are little obsessed about it too. As the dominant European settlers, it is our gift to Canucks. The tools to discuss weather, and a penchant for tea. While British people are specifically obsessed with their one day of snow, or their one week of summer, Canadians are obsessed by freezing rain and spread warnings about it all the time. Because worrying about snow in Canada is for tossers. The problem with this chatting is that it spreads to the 24-hour news networks. Just like everywhere, these feral bullshit gatherers work so hard to whip up the drama of a story, to create an exciting narrative for the purpose of selling advertising, that they end up creating the story itself. There’s going to be freezing rain. Stay indoors, unlike us, filming from our satellite van parked on the hard-shoulder, otherwise you will die. The news networks’ warnings make freezing rain sound like a dastardly, yet mostly ineffective, form of moisture based terrorism.

The fact that I have never witnessed this mysterious form of precipitation and the fact that people are terrorised off the streets by its mere mention means that I am now calling for a ban on H20 in any circumstance where its gas, solid or liquid chemical state is in a position to be confused.

NO MORE TEA FOR YOU, CANADA.

@stuhall occasionally parps out something of vague interest on his blog