Now we await the floodwaters, this time with a peppering of pipes and carrots

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/27/david-mitchell-snow-snowmen-flooding

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Around the middle of last week, I noticed that something was missing from my life. Something I'd grown accustomed to, started to take for granted and found comforting as I leafed through the newspaper each morning. I'm talking, of course, about flooding.

Flooding had become a constant in modern Britain. News of killings and currency collapses, of terrible things happening in the Middle East or Africa, of pointless and anodyne political speeches, of endless rape allegations against the dead were tempered by restful photographs of floods: of ducks swimming past cathedrals, of ineffective sandbagging, of occasional tables bobbing through patio doors while wellied homeowners looked mournfully on, of Toyotas becalmed. Good news would have seemed like propaganda. Interesting snaps of sodden property in the Wye valley is the closest thing to reassurance that feels plausible in these troubled times. And suddenly it was all gone.

It must be because of the snow, I realised. Flooding and snow seem to be as mutually exclusive as infestations of mice and rats. If you've got one problem, you can console yourself with the thought that it precludes the other: like, if you're dead, you can't also be sent to prison for being a child molester. When the water is frozen and blocking roads and railways, it can't get into the rivers to make them overflow and block all the roads and railways; when it's all piled up in the garden, it can't seep under the front door and make your DVD player float away.

"Well that's one thing solved," the Environment Agency must have been thinking, until the irritating news broke that a sudden warm snap was about to melt the snow all at once and make it ooze over everything, like squirty cream under a warm grill. But, even as geese looked forward to renewed access to the Tewkesbury branch of Costa Coffee, the agency was on the case: "Ideally, if everybody built themselves a snowman that will slow the thaw down a bit," said its spokesman, Ray Stokes.

Not only was this a headline-grabbing suggestion, it sort of made sense. When snow in the garden melts, the snowman is always the last bit to go. For ages after the lawn has returned to its accustomed wintry green, the shrinking white lump of the snowman clings on under the carrot and pipe like the medieval Byzantine empire around Constantinople. Snow that's compacted into snowmen clearly melts more gradually. If we make enough snowmen – an army of them – then we might just slow the thaw enough to give our overworked rivers a chance of getting all the water out to sea without it destroying a billion pounds worth of carpets first.

This plan reminded me of a recurring event from my childhood: my dad moaning to my mum about the burdensome nature of the garden. "The garden's not going to weed itself, you know." "You don't seem to understand that the lawn's getting out of control and if I don't do something about it, no one will." "There's the pruning of the roses still to be done, you don't seem to realise." The endless chore of the garden, this Sisyphean task of keeping nature under control, seemed to oppress him.

I was an adult before I realised that he loved gardening. It's his hobby – he adores it. And yet he has always managed, with startling rhetorical nerve, to define it as work. He might as well have said: "These golf balls aren't going to hit themselves into holes unaided, Kathy." "You don't seem to understand that we're still on level one of Call of Duty<em> </em>and someone's got to roll up his sleeves and sort it out."

And so it was for millions under the Stokes plan: "It's urgent that I should go outside and build a snowman," people must have been saying to their loved ones. "If we don't get out there and frolic in all that Christmassy prettiness then we're not taking our duty as citizens seriously." "Much as I'd like to come in and help with the annual audit I'm afraid snowman building has to be the priority or we might all drown," they'll have emailed their offices. It was as if Winston Churchill had told everyone to drink beer to help the war effort.

Better still, experts all seemed to agree that Stokes's idea made sense. At the University of Reading Mel Sandells, a snow physicist (she was built last year by a group of students and then magically came to life), conceded the plan's "logic" and said: "It comes down to the rate of heat transfer and energy that can pass through air bubbles in the snow. The more compact they are, the slower the snow will thaw." And Dr Sim Reaney, a physical geography lecturer at the University of Durham, said: "I can see how it would work … Any snow that is compacted takes longer to thaw, whether it be on a road or as a snowman."

Sadly, while they agreed that building snowmen would help, it was only in the same way that wearing a hat helps inhibit male pattern baldness. It does help – just hardly at all. Building snowmen would make a real difference – possibly even a scientifically measurable difference – but not a noticeable difference. It would be the straw you didn't add to a camel's back after it had already broken. "While building snowmen is great fun, sadly it is unlikely to make a significant difference to the overall rate at which the snow melts across the country and won't protect your home from flooding," one of Ray Stokes's colleagues at the Environment Agency confirmed. I wondered whether she'd go on to say that doing a conga can help stop your car rusting in the damp (by fractionally increasing atmospheric temperature thus causing quicker evaporation of moisture), but she didn't.

Still, the press will be relieved that their pages of snowman photos can swiftly be replaced by shots of pipe- and carrot-bearing floodwaters, transforming Britain's high streets into a vision of Venice. That bit on the outskirts where there's a boarded-up Jessops.