I’ll confess I’m finding the bad weather a little tedious.

There are a few reasons for this. First, the fact that it gets cold every year in this country really shouldn’t be a lead news item for days on end – but somehow it is. Second, it makes me talk about it so I become tedious.

I’m also always a little disappointed by it. Yesterday morning I was in Westminster for a meeting and it looked beautiful. But a few hours later, as the snow stopped, the roads and pavements turned into a dirty slush and the white crowns on Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster started to melt and fade it just became a bit cold and miserable. I’m not sure if the few hours of picture postcard scenery made the cold, wet walk I then had to take up to Victoria Street worthwhile. But maybe I’m just a misery by nature.

It also impacts on the council’s services, and it’s hard for the council to meet the expectation that everything will work as normal. However, it almost managed. The main victim yesterday was refuse collection – made worse because the same collection last week was the first hit by the heavy snow and a small number (around twenty) were missed for a second week (given that many boroughs just cancelled last week’s collections altogether Wandsworth has done a good job to minimise the disruption). Many of those, however, are from housing estates, and therefore the refuse is in designated refuse areas rather than people’s homes or gardens.

Refuse collection is back to normal today and teams are also working on clearing back log, so the twenty or so missed collections should be caught up this week.

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