It’s stopped snowing…
The Met Office said that it would snow yesterday, snow today and snow tomorrow. Well I don’t know about tomorrow but if they think that the few paltry flakes that ambled their way to the ground at about 3am this morning constitute snow then they need to think again. I want whiteout. I want eleven foot drifts. I want to have to dig a tunnel from the front door to a car that’s completely buried and that I couldn’t use anyway partly because I can’t drive, mostly because it would be buried (and frozen). I want to have to scrape 2 inches of ice off the inside of the windows (although F and I do have a bit of a battle over this. I say that being able to see your breath inside the house is not only normal, it’s good for you. He says that it isn’t. Consequently I spent a lot of my day running up stairs, diving into the room where the boiler is and turning off the heating. F spends an equal amount of time dashing from his room - he works upstairs - and switching it back on again. The only time I get my own way on this is if he happens to be asleep and then the heating is switched off and the house becomes gloriously cold).
I want a proper winter. This is not a proper winter. This is Christmas card weather.
Proper winters are when the pipes freeze and you need to break the ice in the toilet bowl every morning. Proper winters are when you take a bath with your vest on because it’s just too bloody cold to bathe naked and even then you can’t stay in the bath too long in case you get hypothermia as the water cools. Proper winters freeze the toothpaste in the tube. Proper winters happen when the central heating packs up (although for a really proper winter to happen you shouldn’t have central heating at all) but that’s ok because you’ve got coal fires although you need to ration the coal because the roads are blocked and the coalman can’t get through. Proper winters are so cold that the coal fuses into one big mound and it takes you twenty minutes to carve out a lump that hisses and screams like a live thing when you put it on the fire.
During a proper winter you get dressed and undressed within the safety of the bedclothes. You drink a lot of tea and you eat a lot of broth. You cannot feel your fingers but your toes tingle with the red hot warmth of chilblains and your eyes are cold and starey. If this was a proper winter then I would not be able to see the green sticks of the fence from through my window and the branches would not criss-cross with candyfloss, but would snap beneath the white.
Proper winters stop all unnecessary questions.
Proper winters are masculine not feminine. They do not float around in white fur coats and have no truck with pointed crowns of ice. Proper winters hit you with a knuckled nosebreak crack then snap your ribs with one well-aimed kick.
Proper winters are so white that you are blinded. They’re soft and cruel. They’re beautiful to behold. Proper winters score stains of becks black bleeding through the land.
Proper winters are so silent that you can hear the world think. It hurts to breathe. The stars shiver from the cold. During a proper winter the sky is full and the ground is filled and the air is swirled with hira-shuriken snowflakes. There is no horizon and the taste of apricot metal in the air.
I would give anything to have another proper winter. To be caught in bleak and hot with cold and the world reduced to that tight bright lock of chill. The chances of us having it here are slim though. We need to be further out. Miles out. Not just near the moors but on them. In a place that has real weather.
But I would give anything to have just one more proper winter. Almost anything at all.
January 5th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Love the style but don’t share the sentiment. Brrr!
January 7th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Holy crap, you’re on here again! How are you? We had a good snow here in Philadelphia recently - about two feet the week before Christmas, but thankfully we don’t get too buried here as lord knows Philadelphia does not believe in plowing the streets or salting.
It sounds to me that you should do a vacation somewhere good and snowy for a week or so to satisfy your craving.
January 7th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Hi Y - it’s a bit weird to be blogging again after such a long hiatus (family - not herebe - found my blog aaaaaaargh!) so thank you very much for the compliment. Only new years resolution I made was to get back to the blog (well that and making more money, but the making more money resolution doesn’t count does it? it’s like the losing weight and being nicer to people ones).
Hi Christine. Yes I’m back. It’s been a while for the above and some other reasons (major life changes including homelessness, despair etc…) but (with a bit of luck) I’m back in the blogosphere! Working my way through your posts to try to catch up so expect a few random comments on months old posts over the next few weeks!
F of course is blaming me for the fact that about an hour after I posted this, the snows started to hit and the country’s now having the worst winter in 30 years…alledgedly. Personally speaking I don’t think it’s that bad - I seem to remember much worse winters than this. Although (as he pointed out) it might be that I remember the snow being deeper because I was younger and therefore shorter then.
They’re saying that it might be like this for the next month too which is brilliant! More snow! Bring it on! (although unfortunately the heating’s still working)
January 8th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Wow. Here, in the grips of an Australian summer, you make me yearn for the cold again.
Since coming to Sydney the things I’ve missed most are the crisp, dry, windy autumns. When you can go walking though an almost deserted city at night, chilly winds whirling drifts of leaves around you, stars sharp and clear in the cold skies, sounds all somehow sharper yet more distant…
The death of summer always makes me feel more alive.
January 8th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Having been through the Carrshield winter of ‘63 I know where you are coming from. I used to deliver the post to the outlying farms, Taylor Burn, Black Clough and Turney Shield. I know what you mean about air so cold it hurt when you breathed.
2 inches of ice on the windows? That’s maybe a slight exaggeration. The most I ever remembered was half an inch. Frozen toilet? What toilet - we had an earth closet which needed a hammer and chisel to empty it when the pile rose to seat level.
Getting dressed under the bedclothes? Yeah I remember that. The trick was to leave your clothes under the top quilt so that they didn’t freeze you when you put them on.
As to rationing coal - you only need one winter to realise that you need to order at least two tons, along with a cupboard full of tinned food before winter sets in. Of course today you would stock your freezer, best kept in an unheated outside building so you don’t need to worry when the power goes off.
January 9th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
I love Autumn too, I’ve always felt very priviliged that my birthday falls in September. It’s quite strange though - I like really hot weather, absolutely adore it and can stand quite fierce height but winter’s when I come alive. I read a story (it was DH Laurence I think) about a woman who spent a summer lying on a beach (or at least that’s the bit I remember) baking like a lizard in the sun, and that’s me! But winter…I heard on the radio the other day that apparently Russians get happier the lower below zero it gets. Minus 10 is good apparently, minus 20 even better. That sort of sums me up so obviously my latvian blood comes out in the cold! I’m absolutely loving this (although not quite enough snow or sub-zero for me at the moment).
You’re right, there is a clarity of thought you get in really cold weather. It energises while heat saps.
Hi John and welcome! I know those places!! We had friends at Low Turney Shield. Turney Shield was the house just down past the cattle grid wasn’t it? Or is my memory completly off?
Seriously, yes, 2 inches of ice on the inside of the windows - however that could have been because we’d bought the house in the September or October and didn’t actually move in until New Years Eve so it had been empty for a while! The people we talked to did mention that the winter we’d moved in was (almost) as bad as 63!
My dad was working away so it was left to mum to cope with the move, we didn’t have a car (and only one bus a week when it could get through) not that it would have been much use anyway and we moved in with no coal other than a couple of bags we’d slung into the back of the removal van. (Which dumped our furniture in the layby and then hot-tailed it back to Newcastle before the roads were completely blocked.) So we (my mum and I - my brother poor little thing decided he wasn’t staying and went back to our grandma’s) lit a fire, whereupon all the pipes in the house burst. By the end of that first night we’d managed to burn a few bits of furniture.
It’s still my most favourite place in the world, definitely the most beautiful place in the world and the place I’d move back to in a heartbeat if I had the chance (for chance read cash). There’s not a day goes by that I don’t miss the aching lonely beauty of it. Still, inching ever closer… I’ll get there in the end, even if it’s just be buried there.
January 11th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Why don’t you just set a tent up in the back garden?
January 11th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
Woo Hoo….I remember all that. Every boiler should come with a health warning IMO. Bleedin softies we are, now.
January 12th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Hi Vanessa!
Tent in the backgarden? It’s a thought! But it wouldn’t be the same, it would just be me camping out in the snow and for it to be a proper winter the cold has to invade your home…
All the damn snow is melting now…I hate it when it starts to look dirty.
January 12th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Hey Clod! Our comments crossed I think.
We are softies nowadays, what with central heating and cars and shops and stuff.
And I agree with you and let’s not be humble about it - our opinions are worth something!- boilers should come with a health warning, nasty noisy things. And that’s before all the heat makes the germs proliferate. There’s nothing like some cold to kill off all the bugs.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:03 am
j’arrivé!
too pissed and tired to actually COMPREHEND anything, of course.
Happy New Decade, regardless!
January 13th, 2010 at 1:18 am
hated with a non-personal austraian shuddering eye-widened insane screaming everything you said here until:
>Proper winters stop all unnecessary questions.
oh.
oh.
and then the rest and all the forecoming made sense. beautiful. in a non-(australian)-life sense.
on the upside, you’ve probably got another 20 years of sharply (SHARPLY) increasingly cold and colder weather ahead.
January 14th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Hi Sal
Happy New Decade!!
Forgot of course that anyone from the South of the world, views cold as if it were the devils own doing and so you would hate with a shuddering, eye-widened insane screaming all thought of frozen toothpaste and ice on the inside of the windows (bloody central heating killed Jack Frost).
But I’m glad you liked it.
And, 20 years of sharply (SHARPLY)increasing cold? Well I do wish that we hadn’t buggered up the planet, but I can’t be sorry that we’re getting proper weather back.
But that is the bit that confuses me. Winters were colder when I was a child. They were, it’s not just my memories of living out in the middle of nowhere 1800 feet about sea level doing it. And I’ve asked my grandparents and snow (a lot of snow) was quite common when they were younger. So surely the warmer winters of the past two decades and before (at least they’ve seemed warmer to me) are the anomaly, not the return to the weather we used to have?
Common sense dictates that we have buggered up the climate - how could we not have have? The number of factories, the number of engines running constantly, the number of buildings spraying heat and fumes and chemicals up into the air, even the sheer volume of people on the planet, this must all affect temperature and pressure and the balance of the weather which (from what I remember of A level geography and a bit of reading since is all exceedingly finely tuned).
So I’m not one of these people who say “there’s no such thing as global warming because look! see! temperatures are dropping” because all of the above and more would affect things and cause temperatures to drop eventually (not counting the position of the British Isles anyway which by rights should be a colder place than it is).
But have the higher temperatures of the past couple of decades (in particular - I know that temp has been rising steadily for much longer than that) been a way of the world shrugging weather back to a balance of sorts (and do we just not know what normal is any more?).
Hum.. those last paragraphs were incredibly confused…and I’m not sure that I’ve actually managed to say what I meant, and I rather think I’ve come across as someone who doesn’t believe in climate change (which I do). Hang on, let me try to write what I mean in very simple (for me to understand) sentences.
Weather used to be colder. It’s not colder now. We’re buggering up the planet’s climate. That’s without a doubt. It’s going to get colder here. But it used to be colder here (and if you look at medieval records it was significantly colder). But then if you look at records from even further back - Roman times say - it was significantly warmer (they grew peaches in the North East). So, if we stopped all the things we do that affect climate then probably things would readjust to a level and a balance will (eventually) be reached because that’s what the planet does. This balance may be colder or it may be warmer than it is now. If we don’t stop doing what we’re doing then obviously the climate pendulum will swing further in either direction…ok, this is where I stop and am flummoxed…
Anyone got any thoughts?
January 16th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
But if balance were the planet’s natural state, then where did the dinosaurs go?
January 16th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Disneyland?
I don’t know. The whole climate thing completely confuses me. I’m veering towards the idea that the more temperate winters we’ve (mostly) been having for the past 20 years or so are a result of global warming but that the net result of global warming will be extremes of temperature - very hot summers, very cold winters…because weather systems will have shifted owing to climate change, but I have no idea at all what weather systems these are (apart from the hadley cell I can’t remember the names of anything). I’m also assuming (perhaps wrongly) that eventually there will be a balance (of sorts).