"How would this compare with your country?" I asked the delectable Fraulein Gruber.
She seemed a bit embarrassed.
"We wouldn't really think this was a heavy snowfall in Germany" she told me.
"Okay, but how does Ireland compare to you guys in the way we handle it?" I wondered.
"There is a lot of talk here about how bad it is but not a lot of action to do something about it," she answered cautiously.
"What are we doing differently to Germany?"
"Well for a start, in Germany it's considered a duty to clear the path outside your house. That's basic. You know everyone benefits. Each person goes out and clears the stretch in front of their house. And the moment the snow falls, the municipal authorities begin clearing our roads. A fall like this would not be allowed to block the streets or roads for long."
The mighty Heelers looked thoughtful at her tender words.
In my heart of hearts I knew she loved me desperately and all this snow talk was just a load of Freudian weltschmerz.
(Steinervortzels - Sigmund Freud note)
Ho hum.
The few days of snow has certainly provoked some of the laziest most mendacious reporting in Irish journalism since the glory days when I was South Kildare correspondent for the now defunct Leinster Leader newspaper.
The Irish Indescuzzdent had a great article this evening about a young mother sitting trapped in her house.
There were huge snow drifts in her driveway according to those heroic dramatists at Independent House.
And she and her two brothers, and her father, and her mother, and her boyfriend, had been absolutely unable to go outside for three days.
She had to boil snow to feed the baby.
Oh come on bold readers, you can see a funny side to that one.
Apparently all of them crammed into their mansion being terrorised out of their minds by Independent Newspapers, the Irish Times and RTE's reportage of the snow, were also for some arcane reason congenitally unable to pick up a shovel and move some snow themselves.
Perhaps they were frozen with fear.
Oh the humanity.
Back home I switched on the legendary Bolshevick RTE itself, nothing like the Irish national fraudcaster to calm my frazzled snow nerves.
Libby Fembo was reading the news.
She's famous in Ireland for running her male co presenter out of the station for the crime of having a penis.
No really.
She averred that he was paid more than her because he was a man, and not because she's an absolutely useless presenter and he's a barely tolerably good one.
The first phrase on her bulletin tonight caught my ear.
"Roads still blocked in Kildare..."
I looked out my window.
Alas poor Kildare.
I knew it Horatio.
I mean I lived there.
Before getting sucked into a parallel universe where the roads are not blocked.
At time of writing nothing is blocked here.
True the County Council's vehicles have heaped up seven feet snow drifts at the sides of some roads.
But those seven foot snow drifts were hardly naturally occurring or indeed due to climate change.
They were due to the fact that the Irish government doesn't know how to clear snow.
More precisely the seven foot snow drifts at the edge of Irish roads were due to the fact that the Irish government while selling our ancient sovereignty to Germany still cannot bestir itself to do what I do and actually talk to some sexy Germans in cafes, or better yet go to Southern Germany, find a few municipal authority managers who know how to manage a snow clearance, and hire
them.
But I digress.
RTE had just announced roads in Kildare were still blocked.
With ever widening eyes I listened to RTE evoke a picture of Kildare which the natives do not know.
A lighter touch was added midway through the news programme.
The much maligned (by me) evening news presenter Libby Fembo suddenly decided to do the news in a music hall style.
Libby sang, danced and twirled, accompanied by tuxedoed cameramen and louche lounge lizard lighting technician types.
Her song went as follows:
"There's no business like snow business
Like snow business I snow
Where else would you get that happy feeling
When you are stealing
Public money through ridiculous pay rises and pension entitlements
In a monopoly State run broadcaster
That's been infiltrated by the Rah
There's no business like snow business
Like snow business we snow
How else can you ignore Dublin's rioting hoodlums
Than by sending the peasantry absolutely spdoodlums
With exaggerated info on the snow
So on, on with the show
On, on with the snow!
Where else can you recycle a climate change dirge
When thermometres surge
And snow flakes merge
It's still on! On with the snow!
There's no people
Like snow people
We smile when we are low
Our reportage is a happy distortion
Like when we're promoting abortion,
Euthanasia, and oh you know
On, on with the snow!
There's no people like snow people
We smile when skies are grey
Even if the snow melts today
We'll still be warning you
It's here to stay
And the world's greatest blizzard is still underway
So on! On with the snow!
On, on with the snow!"
This song is the first thing I've ever liked on RTE.
For the record folks, It started snowing on Tuesday night, exactly seven days ago.
The roads were blocked for three working days.
The roads were blocked that long, not because the snow was so heavy but because Ireland's IRA controlled trade unions have not permitted the development of an efficient cost effective road clearance strategy, ie they refuse to do their jobs when the snow falls, and insist on being paid overtime for not doing their jobs, and triple overtime if they actually show up to ponder the possibility of doing something.
I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.
By Saturday the snow was melting everywhere.
By Sunday the Prime Minister was warning, hopefully I thought, that there might be dead bodies in isolated farms.
By today a media increasingly desperate for fatalities, were reduced to chalking up the death of an eighty year old man who fell in his garden and died a few days later, to the effects of the storm.
I ****** ask you.
