In winter up North your best friends are sometimes a couple of Yetis.

In the UK weather does not happen. It is by and large always grey, overcast and raining. If anything different does happen, for example a heat wave or extreme winter weather, anywhere other than a large gentlemen’s club just North of the Thames then it does not happen.

South of the Thames then any hardship induced by the weather is always national news and how do all those busy commuters cope when they get home from work at 21.00hrs instead of 17.14hrs on the dot. Yes winter in Northernshire arrived a few days before the national news networks noticed.

Here up North people are generally able to cope after years of experience of being ignored and in doing so one acquires ways of coping and new friends.

This year’s dump, we like that new journalistic word for a deposit of snow, as it has other meanings not related to snow, of over a foot of snow creates problems especially when walking.

Now if you are not familiar with Yetis they are well used to snow and many other adverse conditions underfoot and in order to get into work a couple of good Yeti friends are no end of help.

For starters they help keep your legs warm as they go before your legs and feet and clear the snow in front of them while at the same time their coats keep you free from wet snow as well as warm in sub zero 10 below temperatures.

A couple of Yetis are great friends in winter. If you can find a couple of them they make walking much easier than if for example one puts on ones Hunter Wellington boots. Their unique abilities of snow clearance allow the tread of a good pair of boots to grip so much better than lesser footwear products albeit at the expense of befriending a couple of Yetis.

A couple of good Yetis enable to allow your boots to grip frozen snow underneath a fresh fall much better than a Wellington boot would and keep you mobile. If the going gets really tough a couple of good Yetis will allow the application and safe use of a pair of crampons which combined with an ice axe could enable you to be mobile vertically if required.

Yetis, although generally benign, are also hardy beasts. If one is unfamiliar with them then there is a lot of hard physical work involved to ensure that they get to do their job. This may involve many hours of hard labour as well as certain tools to tame your Yetis.

This may result in one, after ones first encounter with a Yeti or two, having unexplained aches and pains the day after struggling to get them to do what you want them to, namely to be there when you need them in the snow.

Yetis are also loyal creatures once tamed and will stick with you like glue. If you decide to jettison them prematurely they will wander off and present you with problems in the snow that a couple of Yeti friends could so easily avoid. Yetis will not return without the struggle described above until the next year you need them but they will not stop your otherwise normal non winter activities once they are off and wandering free.

So fellow Yeti spotters, which Yeti species are we talking about? None other than this one.

Wellies are pants compared with these and that is if you can find wellies at present up North. A couple of Yetis and a good pair of boots give one the option to be mobile up North when vehicles are restricted.

If you have not yet discovered Yetis go out and get some. You will, once you have conquered them, not regret your Yeti friends especially when home visiting is required in huge dumps of snow. Ice axes and crampons similarly have their uses but without your Yeti friends these may have a more limited use than with them.

Praise be to the Party for giving us winter and snow together with the infrastructure to survive it. As with swine flu we are once again the best prepared nation to deal with snow, if you reside in Westminster? In winter you soon find out who your real friends are!

There is always a first time . . .

Following on from yesterday’s weather related post, one of the team, for the first time in their professional lifetime, failed to get their Ferrari out of their manor house’s drive and into work due to snow. There is a huge sense of failing in not being able to get in but the conditions were not the best for rear wheel drive vehicles and most people on the manorial estate that all GPs reside in were in the same boat. More people on foot than usual and all saying the same thing we set off for work and then stopped and hadn’t moved since.

At 06.00hrs was there only yesterday's thin covering of snow by 08.00hrs there was 4 inches. A snowplough got out at lunchtime but the track it cleared and the grit it spread is now covered over by fresh snow. We are stuck and it is still snowing.

The telephone lines have been most entertaining as they are several feet lower than normal and every now and again one of them will start bouncing up and down for no apparent reason before a white, snake like, curved line of snow plummets downwards. The line has broken one thinks as one watches the snow fall down creating a curved indentation in the untouched newly fallen snow?

It looks like it has as one looks at where the line was but then if one looks a foot or two higher one sees the telephone cable is still intact. The schools are closed, the buses cancelled, blood collections normally collected by taxi are being yomped to local hospitals. Those of the ND Central team who could get into work went in 4X4s, on foot or as best they could. Some of us, for the first time ever, could not.

Praise be to the Party for it is always prepared for everything. We are surprised that no-one senior has been wheeled out to tell us how we are the best prepared country in the world for flu, sorry we meant, snow.

Must have been the “wrong” kind of snow? And the ice man cometh tonight . . .