Winter Is Infrastructure

Before dawn, somewhere, a plough is already moving.

Nobody applauds it, or even notices.

Winter here is not weather. It is the thing every road, roof and pipe is built to argue with, and every budget quietly assumes.

We praise resilience as if it were a personality, when mostly it is:

• salt
• shovels
• shift work

The country does not run on slogans alone.
It runs on people who go out before the rest of us wake.

Perhaps that is the real national character: not endurance for its own sake, but the habit of clearing a path for whoever comes next.