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Gordon, I'm 74, so we share the some of the same memories from years gone by. In fact, I travelled through Kent by train on Boxing Day every year on my way via Dover to catch a ferry over to France on my way to skiing in either Switzerland or Austria for the winter. And you could almost guarantee that we would see snow as we went through Kent.
Now, I am not in any way denying that the weather hasn't changed over the years. Even up here, and I am a softie from North London, I would say that the winters are certainly milder than in years gone by. Conversely, I can state that categorically that the summers are not nearly as hot as they used to be when I was 9 or 10 years old; so hot that it was impossible to sleep, some nights.
During my teen years, I went to school not very far from Delta Towers, in Wallingford, alongside the Thames in Oxfordshire. One winter, we had so much snow that the coaches couldn't get in to the school at the end of term so we were stuck there for days when we should have been going home for Easter. And another year, the reverse happened; we were unable to start the Summer term because the school was snowed in, meaning that our coaches wouldn't be able to drive in.
No, what gets my goat is the exaggeration by the journalists in the media. Yes, it is probably a tad less cool in the winter than in years gone by, and overall a fraction warmer during the summer, but I think that we are a long way from a time when we wouldn't see snow in the UK.
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