It's a weather system allowing Siberian air in, not surprisingly that makes it farking cold. Some of you may have seen the icicles in my front garden that I put on facebook.
If you take a look at worldwide record temperatures, you'll see that this forum could have been cluttered with records this year. Heat records. But it's just weather, so I didn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Lowest_temperatures_ever_recordedHere you go - two cold records in 2010, UK and Northern Ireland. Scroll up - Fourteen highest temperature records, in places as diverse as Chad and Finland. Weather is interesting, worth regular threads it seems, but oddly never when it's hot.