Here's a line I never thought I'd hear myself employ: I caught the last plane out. In fact – if only prosaic fact will satisfy you – it was just the last plane out of Heathrow to Dulles International, all later flights to Washington having been cancelled because of the snow forecast to "bury" the city.
There was even some question of whether we'd be able to land at all before the snow began to fall in earnest. But we made it. There's another line I never thought I'd hear myself employ: We made it .
By a whisker. We weren't only the last plane out, we were the last plane in. It was like landing in some hellish Eastern-bloc state before the communists decamped. Not another plane in sight, nothing moving, all the runways vacant, no understanding where the snow was falling from because there was no sky. In such places snow would fall as a kind of ironic commentary on the political system: behold the spiritual nothingness to which ideology has reduced you. But this was Washington – bright, pushy, free-enterprise, illuminated Washington! Snow belongs as though by its intrinsic nature to Communism. Capitalism, one feels, should by now have found a way of dispensing with it. But it was about to close Dulles International Airport.
So how long, I wondered, before the American middle right, the Tea Party folk, would blame the most violent blizzard to hit the capital in living memory on Obama's socialist agenda?
Expect more of this political savvy over the next few weeks. I am in Washington being a visiting professor. Seemed like a nice gig when I was offered it, but that was before the snow fell. Let's not be churlish: it still is a nice gig, or it will be if George Washington University ever reopens. The minute we landed, the city's institutions began to close their doors. You've never seen so much snow. Lock yourself in your room and don't come out is the advice on radio and television. Which is all very well if you're in your own home and have a freezer stuffed with pizzas, but an apartment hotel with a complimentary sachet of coffee, two tea bags, and a packet of chocolate chip cookies – the difference between civilisation and barbarism is the difference between an English biscuit and an American cookie – is no place to be holed up in for a month.
Rather than unpack my summery shirts – the weather had been unseasonably mild in Washington in January; I've even brought shorts in expectation of paddling in the Potomac – I head straight out into the blizzard and make for Trader Joe's, a grocery store which the woolly-hatted porter tells me is just across the road, that's if I can get across the road. Trader Joe's, he adds, is organic. Like I care – to speak the way the locals speak – whether Trader Joe's is organic. I am about to be immured in the worst snow storm in Washington's history and I am supposed to be pleased that I can get unsalted sunflower seeds and reduced guilt (I kid you not) tortilla strips grown with consideration to Mother Earth. In weather like this it's impossible to show love to nature, and I know the argument that says it's lack of love for nature that's got us into this mess. Without going so far as climate change denial, I don't hold with quid pro quo explanations of natural events. This blizzard is an act of motiveless malignancy and there's an end of it.
As luck would have it, Trader Joe's turns out to be the best grocery store with principles I have ever shopped in, and that isn't just desperation talking. Yes, you can get your slivered seeds if you want them, but you can also get salamis soaked in red wine, puttanesca sauce made with red wine, excellent red wine vinegars, red wine mustard, and best of all, red wine itself, organised not only by country but by grape. Suddenly I don't want the siege to end; God willing I won't have to do an hour's teaching and can sample every pinot noir the state of Oregon can produce before I fly back home again, assuming a thaw, in March.
But this isn't all that's raised my spirits. Reader, they are panic buying here. All the bread has gone. All the eggs have gone. Bottled water's running low. (Don't ask me why they're just not buying wine.) And the queues stretch out into the street. And why does this please me? Because it shows it's not just us who go to pieces in extremity. I passed more and bigger snow ploughs between Washington airport and the city than the whole of our impecunious country can rustle up from Land's End to Gretna Green. I drove by mountains of grit as high as Snowdon. This is the way to do it, I thought. This puts us to shame. But the roads remain unploughed and ungritted and they're panic buying in the shops.
What is more, when I turn on the television weather hysteria is all I can find. Channel outdoing channel with "wall to wall coverage of the bad stuff" – "Snowmageddon", Obama is calling it, "snowpocalypse" is another popular coinage – hour upon hour of footage of deserted roads, stranded vehicles, scenes of people fighting one another over the last snow shovel in Walmart. And we Brits are the ones who are said to fall apart when winter strikes. True, it only takes a snowflake to brings our railways to a stop, and here, so far, 30 inches have fallen, but still and all, snow's just snow.
Having seen an item about panic buying in Washington on the BBC News, my mother calls. "I hear they're running out of toilet rolls," she says. When I was a child my mother never let me leave the house without a hundred yards of toilet roll tightly folded in the back pocket of my trousers, "just in case". Now she isn't here to look after me the catastrophe she always dreaded has arrived. "I might still have a wad," I tell her, trying my back pocket.
At school the other boys laughed at my wad of folded toilet paper. Who's laughing now, sucker?
In fact, before you start sending parcels, I have plenty of everything I need, especially self-satisfaction. Last plane out, last plane in, a storm to end storms ravaging a strange city, egg riots at the organic grocery store – and I am unfazed. My wife runs me a bath. After a long soak I crack open a Sonoma County Zinfandel and watch television report more closures. Schools, museums, churches, and now the federal government. Wimps.
