OUR weather patterns are depressingly familiar, as are the reactions to them. In our brief flirtation with what used to be winter, we periodically get a couple of inches of snow around December/January which this year was heralded by warnings of such severity that one could have been forgiven for believing that Armageddon was upon us.

No wonder we are treated as a joke by people in Europe, Scandinavia and North America, where a few inches of snow would be passed off as a minor irritant. Here, we go into disaster mode.

I smiled when I heard about the plight of residents in the Czech Republic.

On Monday there were 39 inches of snow, a temperature of minus 15 degrees yet the Czechs got on with life without closing schools or, presumably, failing to get to work. It made our situation sound pretty small beer.

In my youth, almost 60 years ago, I can recall trudging from Plodder Lane to Farnworth Grammar School in several feet of snow to meet fellow pupils who had travelled much further.

Other senior citizens recount similar tales. We thought nowt of it.

What has happened to the UK? Have we slid so far into the dumper that a snowfall of not particularly desperate density causes a shutdown?

Well, yes, apparently.

And what about the subsequent rainfall, with floods causing chaos and damage across great swathes of England and Wales, mostly in places which have endured similar visitations in the recent past.

We seem incapable of dealing with extremes of the climate, though we've had enough warnings.

Where is all that rain going and why, in another few months time, will we be being warned about water shortages and reservoirs running dry?

Does anyone know? Does anyone care? Will the government agencies, staffed by people with qualifications the length of the River Croal, come up with answers, and more importantly, solutions? I very much doubt it.

But, hey ho, we've got much more important things to concern us, like why has the antics of a sad bunch of so-called "celebrities" gripped the nation to such a degree that the really important stuff is faring very badly when it comes to airtime and column inches.

Jordan, John Lydon and their companions, voluntarily interned in the Australian jungle, are seemingly more newsworthy than the deadly Asian chicken 'flu; war in Iraq and the reasons for it; the theories about life on Mars; violence in Israel and Palestine; the election of a Democrat candidate to stand against George Dubya in the American Presidential election and the murders, rapes and robberies, local and national, which blight our lives.

My Mrs says I am the only person in the world who believes this tosh is an appalling indictment of the way standards of entertainment have plummeted, as everyone else is enjoying it. Eating bugs is entertainment, is it? They have to do that in the Third World. There, it's called starvation.