I ain't going on no goddam plane, fool!

You may say that it's easy enough for the inhabitants of Stockholm, Helsinki or Moscow to express dismay at the poverty of BAA's attempts at Heathrow to cope with a meagre amount of snow, when they get that experience without fail every winter, and far worse. But it really is staggeringly pathetic, considering that we're talking about the world's largest international airport having only two runways and nothing set in place for the eventuality of an actual winter - denial of Britain as a northern country being a treasured national foible - as is British Airways' ingenious sidestepping of the issue by cancelling all flights to destinations that, strangely, other airlines were perfectly happy to continue flying to, presumably reasoning that they'd get less grief from passengers whose Christmas they'd fucked if they didn't let them come to the airport to air their complaints. Meanwhile, back to BAA: the Government offers them the Army's help in snow clearance; a rare opportunity for those defence billions, otherwise spent on drills and wargames of largely intangible benefit, to be put to real use, and BAA turns them down with snide inferences to snow clearing as the business of specialists. Which they so clearly are (and the tanks used as snowploughs at Moscow Sheremetyevo are figments of the imagination). As opposed to BAA being penny-pinchers whose only concern is to avoid loss of face.
There was a man who would not get off the ground under any circumstances, against all rhyme or reason, and had to be pressganged each week to make that flight. His name was B.A.