On Winter Weather

I really like snow. A decent covering of proper snow, delivered overnight, preferably with a howling gale, deep enough to prevent anyone going off and doing boring things like work or school, and of the correct consistency for snowmen and sledging, is one of the very best things known to mankind. Obviously it would be unpleasant to contend with these conditions on a regular basis, and I don’t particularly envy those people who happen to live in perennially snowy climes and who probably get a bit sick of having to excavate half a tonne of frozen water every few days in order to get to the shops. But the occasional blizzard in a normally temperate climate is a wonderful thing, and we definitely used to have them here in the UK, and I think they were marvellous.

Winters nowadays are, frankly, rubbish. The months from December to March are one long smear of grey, punctuated for interest with occasional cataclysmic rainstorms that strip tiles from the roofs and destroy small market towns. Every year, having slogged through the foggy, drizzly slough of seasonal affective misery that is November, I expect some reward in the form of a few days of snow and ice in December, but every year I am disappointed. I hold out hope that January or February may perform their proper duties and deliver some appropriately frozen precipitation, but every year I endure walls of rain and rapidly melting hail and sleet without so much as an inch of proper snow. I vainly wish for March to deliver some unexpected, monumental blizzard to redeem the preceding months’ derelictions, but it never happens. By the time we get to April night time temperatures are up in double figures and people are planting pineapples and mangoes out in their gardens. The only upside of recent winters has been the random scattering of unseasonably hot days that turn up like unexpected American tourists in Hawaiian shirts, shocking all the sensibly attired Brits clad in duffel coats and bobble hats by being warm and friendly when any decent February day would act aloof and chilly and keep its head down. Apart from these pleasant but brief interludes, the current presentation of the colder half of the year is utterly lacklustre and depressing, and under such conditions it is hard to refrain from the temptation of reminiscence: it seems to me that the winters of my childhood and teenage years, up until about 1995 or so, were much more interesting that they are nowadays.

I remember multiple snowmen, with carrots and bits of rock for eyes (we didn’t have any coal, living as we did in a centrally heated house in a smoke free zone). I distinctly remember my dad building an actual igloo, something that would now be impossible without having sufficient quantities of the requisite building materials imported from overseas or generated with expensive and dangerous machinery. I recall zooming down the hills on cheap plastic sledges over a good foot or so of snow that had been on the ground for days. I remember my dad skiing down this hill with a load of other lunatics, enjoying the use of a makeshift ski-lift cobbled together out of a couple of old tractors by an enterprising local farmer. If you were wrapped up suitably it was truly splendid playing about in the transformed, school-free world that followed a decent snowfall. My last memory of proper snow in West Yorkshire is my walking into town through a full-blown blizzard for New Year’s Eve celebrations because the buses had been cancelled, and I think that was 1995 or 1996. Since then we have had nothing but drizzle and patchy scurfy slush that melts by noon. There must be an entire generation of children who have never had school cancelled because of snow.

Of course, we all know why this is the case. The planet is getting warmer, and the feeble, damp winters currently suffered by the UK have probably done significant work to reinforce the arguments for that statement in the minds of the British public. Even those sorry, joyless husks of people who profess a hatred of wintery weather must surely now feel some vague hankering for a bit of proper snow occasionally, if only out of a desire for a change from the permanent cloud-bank of misty drizzle that looms immovably over the gloomiest months. Those of us who actually liked snowy days have now despaired of ever seeing a decent winter out in this country. We’re going to have to fly off somewhere foreign, thereby exacerbating the problem further, if we want to show our kids the correct way of building a snowman*. That is unless the Gulf Stream turns off, in which case even the snowphilia of people like me is going to be sorely tested by a new North European mini-Ice Age.

*Correct snowman construction method: small ball of snow for head atop big ball of snow for body with sticks for arms. None of your three-body-part, insectoid creations, thank you very much.

2 comments 2008-03-24 17:12 Categories: Personal