Why Poland is "surprised" by winter and snow every year?

Poland has nothing to apologise for. My 78 year old mother's flight to Poland from Birmingham, England, was cancelled today because of snow in Brum.

It took 4 hours to get home (It's only an hour away... trains couldn't handle it!). Then when she got a taxi from the station, the taxi wouldn't take her into her housing estate because "the snow's piling up". So the driver left my mother to drag her heavy suitcase home...

The piling up snow, which a 78 year old woman with a heavy suitcase could manage, but not a so-called professional cabby, was about 2 inches (5cm) deep, according to mum.

Typical fat bellied lazy git...you can take joy in knowing the lack of exercise will kill him with a heart attack....

Apparently it was orders from head-office.

What p1sses me off is that it's not as if these winters are a strange thing in UK anymore. When I was growing up heavy snow was not THAT common (which is why people don't know how to drive in it) but over the last few years it has become so. So why do Britain still not have winter tyres by law?

You don,t need winter tyres to drive on two inches of snow....

The problem is people can,t dam well drive...

True, but then they don't drive on 2 inches anyway (so who needs tyres).

It's the people who leave their cars and block the snowplough, I'm thinking of.

Yeah...i used to love driving in the snow , but even with a 4 x 4 you are stuck if the road is blocked by cars that ventured out when they can,t get through it...You can,t drive over the top of them...

I did two years driving a transit van through some bad winters , and they are hopeless on snow , but with a bit of skill , and a handy shovel , i did not get stranded...

Last time I drove on snow people to the left and right, in front and in back were getting their vehicles stuck in ditches. Because of them I knew where the trouble spots were and managed to avoid getting stuck.

I saw pick up trucks stuck in store driveways and knew which ones not to attempt turning into.

I learned about snow driving in the army in Germany. I remember one year in England driving down the road in my creaky old Ford Escort estate, pulling people out of ditches and snow-drifts. I ended up giving a lift to a one-legged mountaineer who was riding through the blizzard on a Honda 70 step-thru.

Between my farm and the local town there are some nice bits of Polish road where the camber is all wrong , very easy to slide off into the ditch , or worse still into a tree if you don,t know where these places are....

Got a few of those too.

Mind you, the best thing about the snow is that when it's thick and hard packed it fills and covers all the potholes and makes the road surface almost even!

True...there is a road i know in Russia where everyone crawls along at a snails pace in good weather due to the huge holes....but in winter , they drive flat out on it....on sheet ice....!

The Eastern US got slammed by a major snowstorm yesterday, particularly the Northeast. It dumped up to 32 inches in parts of New Jersey and New England. We got away with only about 8 inches here -our first real snow event of the season- but it still caused flight cancellations, leaving a lot of holiday travelers stranded with family for an extra day. Even a pro football game was cancelled and had to be rescheduled in a couple days. Had to shovel out this morning. Roads and traffic didn't seem so bad since a lot of peeps are away or on vacation from work and the kids are on Winter break from school this week.