The big freeze of 1962-63

'This is warm lad'. FYI that's the Thames.

Christmas may be on the horizon but winter can be a bleak time for a gradult. The current weather conditions have forced me off my bike, and getting to work in the morning is now an arduous task. The route has always been tough as I have to pass through throngs of students on the way; not in a sense that they might attack me but just because no gradult wants to see a happy, carefree student moaning about two hours of lectures when they themselves are staring down the barrel of eight hours on a phone. Luckily today the temperature has increased ten degrees on yesterday so it wasn’t quite so horrific but why am I in a position where I’m thankful for it being only -2°c? I didn’t sign up for this; I thought I lived in lovely, temperate England. On Tuesday as I skated gingerly along the pavement I wondered, things surely have never been worse than this?

Well a bit of company time research, the best kind of research, told me that things have in fact been a whole lot worse. The Big Freeze of 1962-1963 was so bad it has its own Wikipedia page, I’ve said in a previous post that you know weathers bad when it has a nickname, well you know weather is truly evil when people are prepared to give up their time to edit a fact based web page about it. And I’m forever grateful they did because otherwise I wouldn’t have learnt that this Big Freeze caused 1.6 kilometres of sea to freeze, the last time I saw this happen it was accompanied by David Attenborough talking about polar bears. Other strings to the original Big Freeze’s bow include a cheeky 36 hour blizzard, some winds reaching a casual 90mph and most unforgivably a three month disruption to the sporting calendar. FA Cup third round ties were being played in March! Now that’s too far.

But previous generations could put up with things like this, ask someone who lived through the Big Freeze of 62 and their eyes will light up, they will revel in the chance of telling you every frost bitten detail. But this is a generation who lived without the internet for god’s sake, forget Sky, these guys didn’t even have Channel 5. They loved this backs to the wall weather, us 21^st century gradults just aren’t cut out for it. It maybe be a pale imitation of the weather that has gone before but it’s already gotten the better of this gradult.