Stiff upper lip? Don't make me laugh

We are, as the world knows (not least because we tell them), a nation of stoics. Unlike the Americans, when there is an upsurge of terrorism in the world, we do not immediately cancel our trips to terror hotspots such as Cannes or the Cotswolds. No, we keep travelling, no matter who might be standing beneath our plane, holding a surface-to-air missile launcher. "If it's got your name on it... " we tell each other. We also have no fear of the elements, spending entire hours out in the sun without factor 35 sun-cream, and - in Newcastle at any rate - walking the freezing midnight pavements between clubs while wearing just about nothing. We're the new Spartans, we are.

Last week three things happened, none of them to us. Let's take them in descending order of schadenfreude. First was the power failure that blacked out a third of the cities in north America last Thursday, covering nearly 10,000 square miles and 50 million people. The traffic lights stopped, the street lights went out, the freezers unfroze, trains in the subways conked out and their passengers had to be led along the tracks to safety, millions walked miles and miles to get home.

In New York, Toronto, Detroit and Cleveland, stranded passengers slept in the airports. In Detroit elderly residents living in public housing were told to go to designated "cooling centres" around the city. The water pumping stations could not operate and every switch that you can imagine failed. Not only that, but in some cases it took days before things were functioning again. The first New York subway trains did not begin to move until 30 hours after the blackout began.

Over the weekend I scanned the pages of the New York Times for the orgy of recrimination that must surely have broken out when a nation as effete as the Yanks was deprived so absolutely of its creature comforts. And I couldn't find it. I discovered a report headlined For Agencies, the Blackout Was Well Timed, expressing the relief of advertisers and media organisations that the blackout had occurred (a) in the summer and (b) close to the weekend. Another story began - astonishingly - with the words, "Virtually the only place yesterday where there were even a few after-effects of the blackout could still be felt was... " And elsewhere a Michehl R Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, a consumer pressure group, declared in far from thunderous tones, "What we really need to focus on now is why protective schemes that should have localised the impact of various events did not work."

Finally, a Louis Uchitelle wrote an analysis, beginning, "For all the inconvenience and disruption that the blackout of 2003 inflicted, the damage to the national economy is not likely to be any worse than damage from a bad snowstorm." Inconvenience? Disruption? Half the country closes down, and they say it is inconvenient? What are these foreign journalists on?

Hold this thought: what would John Humphrys have said if the same thing had occurred in Britain? And, still holding it, let's move on to France, where we discovered last week that up to 5,000 old people might have died unnecessarily in the recent heatwave. Five thousand! And why? Partly because the French health services (those exemplars to the rest of us) couldn't cope, what with all their staff being away on holiday at the same time. And partly because these pensioners (many of whom fought for their country, but most of whom probably didn't), were abandoned by their children who had also gone en vacances. As a result of the enhanced mortality, they have had to open a giant mortuary (capacity 2,000) in a disused fruit and vegetable warehouse just outside Paris.

Now, this has caused a stink in France and the surgeon-general has resigned. The socialist opposition has blamed the government, and the government has retorted by pointing the finger at the 35-hour week brought in by the socialists. Even so, this rowing has been cut short by the intervention of the president of the French Red Cross, who has said that the "witch-hunt to find out who is responsible in this crisis is, frankly, indecent," adding, "we are all responsible".

So add to the earlier thought this new element: what would the Daily Mail or the Mirror have said about 5,000-plus elderly Brits being cooked to death in the recent fine weather? And quickly remind ourselves that, finally, Germany and Italy were both said officially to be in recession last Thursday.

Now let's return to that question of how these mishaps might have been treated had they taken place here in Blighty. The Americans should understand that a national disaster is what happens when 7,000 houses are damaged by flood water, the French that a national scandal is what you have when 123 children are given the wrong A-level results. Devastation is a high wind in a caravan park, and chaos (according to the London Evening Standard) is what you get when you re-sequence the traffic lights or when a Lexus driver from Kent is wrongly billed for the congestion charge. The culprit must be found if a sudden snowstorm holds drivers up for two or three hours, or if the trains slow down because the rails are hot. And a real economic downturn is best exemplified (as it was in Britain last week) by yet another fall in the unemployment rate.

The truth is that we cannot afford to have a countrywide blackout or for our old people to die of too much sun, because we've used up all our catastrophe words already. Which is an odd thing for stoics to have done.