WIND VERSUS FOG.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 112, 11 April 1934, Page 8

WIND VERSUS FOG.

CONDITIONS IN LONDON. Londoners never ' though to see the time when they would say with Shakespeare ‘‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” They never imagined they would be reduced to hailing the March winds, so cold and bitter, with the enthusiasm evinced by Germans when hailing Hitler (writes a London correspondent under date March 1). Such, however, is the c<pndition of mind and spirit to which they have been brought by a winter of persistent and suffocating fog. Clear skies that have spelled drought- and a frosty atmosphere have conspired for months to produce a recurrence of fogs which not only enveloped London but covered the greater part of the country. Not since the winters of 1879 and 1880 .has anything like it been seen. True, we have been spared the ‘‘London Particulars, so feelingly described by Charles Lamb and Dickens, but there have been several occasions when visibility Avas Innited to three or four yards. The mevitab’e consequences have been a continuous epidemic of street, accidents and a flourishing crop of minor chest and throat troubles. For let none imagine that a London fog conduces either to health or happiness. For the most part, it is of a gaseous and poisonous consistency, hurtful alike to eyes and nostrils, and damaging to the lungs. Most of us had fondly counted upon very different conditions. After a dry and sunny summer we were almost prepared to bet the proverbial shirt on a wet winter. We were quite ready for rain -and snow and an occasional tempest, but not for fog. But it is always the unexpected, that should be expected, as most events in nature and life seem' to indicate only too clearly. Still, it does strike one as curious that when the whole country is literally as arid as a bone we should be plagued by a form of bad weather usually associated with fens and -bogs. Who can wonder, then, that London should be willing to greet the winds of March with positive affection ? Although formerly dreaded as the culmination of all that is unpleasant in the English winter, they will come this year as a boon and a blessing, for, if it is a question of preferences, we would rather shiver than choke. Even the English climate does not ask us to do both. |