Continent isolated

"Eurostar fails. Continent isolated" was a nice variant on the legendary newspaper headline, "Fog over the Channel. Continent isolated", which was attributed to the London Times in the early 20th century. As you may have read in the news, 2000 people spent up to 15 hours trapped in a Eurostar train under the English Channel in the days leading up to Christmas.

I, too, thought that I was going to have problems getting from Munich to London for the family festivities. The heavy snow in Munich had little effect on my journey but I knew that even the slightest sign of snow in Britain was likely to cause havoc. It seemed almost incredible that there had been a problem at all, as when we finally arrived at Gatwick airport I could see blades of grass through the thin covering of snow. Yet this had been enough to shut down a major international airport for several hours the previous evening.

In Britain, an emergency like this is supposed to bring out the best in people. Certainly the taxi driver was unusually talkative, telling me how ten-minute journeys were taking over an hour. On a particularly treacherous evening the department store, John Lewis, invited stranded shoppers to spend the night in their bed department. Maybe this was just PR for the sales that were due to begin in the next few days.

Perhaps it even paid off, as there was a record of 12 million people shopping in the UK on Boxing Day. I made a minor contribution to this consumer mania by buying a delightful new book about the peculiarities of the British, Black Cabs and Sleeping Policemen by Harry Oliver. It provides even more examples of how the British differ not only from their continental neighbours but also from the rest of the world.