IMBYism, innt?
2010 was okay, but it was sopping wet snow rather than powder. No icicles. Ice days, yes, barely, but not coinciding with snowfall hence no powder. Feb 2005 saw much more snow, for far longer - it was the last time we had a textbook easterly setup, just a shame it was so late in the winter.
Jan 1997 was much better. Powder, icicles, daytime highs of -2 or -3 (and a string of ice days), sublimating snow (another thing not seen since then) and a proper deep cold easterly rather than recirculated northerlies.
Jan 96 was also better, as was Feb 91, Jan 87, Feb 86... the list goes on.
I can't believe that some people on here simply don't appreciate that 2010 was relatively pants in the far SE.
I did anticipate your response!
I do understand why a few people on this forum, owing to their particularly unfortunate location, won't be convinced that that they lived through one of the ultimate winter events that this country can deliver.
But in a way that just emphasizes the extraordinary nature of the cold some of the rest of us experienced in Dec. 2010. If there were places such as yours, where it was all a bit forgettable, just think how unprecedentedly cold that month must have been in other places for the month as a whole to be more than a whole degree celsius colder than any other nationwide December since Met Office records began.
Leaving the Leysdown let-down aside, why do so many other people in this country still ignore the fact that they experienced prolonged and record-breaking cold so recently, and at a time of year when it had previously only existed in a novelist's imagination?
I can only think that too many people's daily life that month consisted of walking from a stifling, centrally heated house to a car in a garage, then turning on the heater and driving through an urban heat island to a stifling, centrally heated office. Then immediately going online and gloomily noting the breakdown on day 10 of the model output.
2 miles west of Taunton, 32 m asl, where "milder air moving in from the west" becomes SNOWMAGEDDON.
Well, two or three times a decade it does, anyway.