Don’t Panic Mr Mainwaring

For those of you of a certain age you will remember Dads Army a popular sitcom of the 1970s that told the tale of a Home Guard Platoon in a fictional south coast town. This is already too much information for my overseas readers an explanation. The Home Guard was set-up in the summer of 1940 after Hitler had invaded France and there was a real worry that Britain would be next. The Home Guard was a locally recruited local defence force, of those who basically were too old, young or infirm to fight. Initially they were equipped with no weapons, or uniforms.

As an aside when sorting through my mother’s house I came across a photo of my father whom must have been around seventeen with his brother and my grandfather posing in their Home Guard uniforms. I once asked my father about this experience at this time and whether he was frightened. Just the opposite, he had been given a rifle and was asked to patrol the countryside. As a teenage boy he had the time of life, probably being a danger only to the local rabbit population. Hollywood is doing a make over of Dads Army with Catherine Zeta-Jones and every British actor you have ever heard of. There are lots of scenes filmed local to us in Bridlington and the North Yorkshire Moors heritage railway.

Any way that really was a ramble, the point was that Corporal Jones a veteran soldier at any hint of crisis always used to say “Don’t Panic”. I was reminded of this during the current bad weather in Europe and the rail chaos in London recently. The news outlets interviewed people and the hyperbole coming from them was breath taking. The fact that people on a skiing holiday could not drive down a valley was a complete disaster on a scale of the great plague and that in their opinion the French government ought to have provided a personal snowplough for them. The fact that they were trying to drive on alpine roads in winter without snow tyres was blithely ignored. Similarly people trying to travel back from London on Saturday. Now I am the first one to moan about East Coast Trains, however the travel chaos was an inconvenience not a matter of life and death. The juxtaposition of the Greek ferry disaster overnight perfectly illustrates my point.

How refreshing to hear a traveller stuck overnight at a service area in Yorkshire by a snowstorm. For my American readers this was not a big fall of snow, but enough to paralyse the UK. He said he had a duvet and a hot drink from a local hotel, and chalked it up to experience. We had a similar experience some years ago when our children were younger. We turned up at Ostend for a ferry that was delayed overnight by high winds. We dug the duvets out of the boot, cuddled down and got a good nights sleep. Although at the time we moaned and groaned, it was not a disaster, it is now something that as a family we now look back on fondly.

So spare us this faux outrage, and hyperbole, reserve our concerns for something that matters.