If you are old enough (like me) to remember the seventies in any detail, this recent cold spell may remind you of your younger days when it did this almost every year.
Disco, flairs, decimalisation and real snow. Great big drifts up against the back door in the morning, which fell in if you tried to open them. Opportunities to really sledge down big hills on borrowed tea trays. Snow you could actually build great big snow things out of. Mine are traditionally seals as they amuse me and you can sit on them.
I think this is the first real winter I have experienced in this country since my childhood in London, and despite it having been inconvenient in a few ways, I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I actually learned to drive in conditions like this, so it doesn’t freak me out like it seems to most people. I have witnessed some glorious dumbarsery on the roads, with people putting their right foots down hard, like this will somehow make the ice under their wheels part like the Red Sea.. mm hmm.
Even though half the population are behaving like aliens have landed, I personally think it’s something beautifully unique about Britain; we have weather. It changes dramatically when it’s working properly and I think I’d miss it if I lived elsewhere.
This is me trying to be positive in the chilly face of adversity by the way… don’t knock it just yet.
So here’s to seasons, and changes, and our seeming inability to cope with either.
