It's Cold? It's January, Get Over It

Or, in the words of Peter Hitchens:

I have just finished a three-mile walk through strong winds and driving rain, which I much enjoyed. I like weather, and long ago accepted the argument (originally made, I think, by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) that there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.

But I would much have preferred the same walk in piercing cold, which I would have been able to do the day before. And I am irritated by weather forecasters who assume that we all long to be warm all the time and will be pleased that the frosts have gone away. I like sitting round a hearth as much as anybody, or walking into a warm kitchen. But these things are not half so pleasant unless you have come in from the cold outside.

Proper British cold weather is exhilarating, stimulating and good for you. It's the sitting inside in stuffy rooms that makes you ill. I still recall experiencing as a small child the sharper frosts of Scotland, on the Fife coast of the Firth of Forth, and finding the milk solid in the bottles on the doorstep, with the cream thrust up out of the bottle and he foil cap perched on top.

Sometimes it brings glorious clear air, so that you can see further than at any other time of year. Sometimes it comes with mysterious fogs. I am still sad that I shall never see again the overpowering sight of an express steam engine coming into a station one foggy winter dusk in a small Dartmoor town, entirely surrounded by its own cloud of steam glowing pink, red and gold.

When it freezes lakes and ponds, and hardens the earth, it makes sound travel quite differently, so that church bells across a long distance have a special hollow echo to them that (like the bells themselves, only more so) is uniquely English.

Anyway, I have to break it to you that it is not really cold here at all. The dangerous, angry aspect of real cold, beating down on us from space, is perfectly described by Jack London in his short story 'To Build a Fire'. There are two versions of this tale, one with a bitter ending, and the other not. I prefer the sad one, myself. The description of Arctic cold, murderous, almost malicious, and merciless, is unmatched. Though John Buchan comes close in one of his stories, the name of which I can't recall.

My first proper experience of real cold was in Warsaw in November 1980, where I had stepped off the train from Berlin in quest of the Solidarity revolt, and immediately wondered if I would die of frostbite before I got up to Gdansk and located Lech Walesa. Nothing that I had thought of as cold up till then had prepared me for the saw-edged winds that blew through that dark, half-starved city that winter. Yet I have also seldom felt so awake and alert.

Later I would live in Moscow, where cheap vodka, with its rather low freezing point, was useful for defrosting car windscreens. And I would travel to the milder regions of Siberia where a gale could actually drive you indoors clutching your forehead (the only exposed bit of you) in pain. Others told me (I never got that far) of regions where even the cars were triple-glazed, film froze inside cameras, and your spittle was solid ice before it hit the ground. One night in Karaganda I walked through a frozen fog of floating ice-crystals, leaving a man-shaped tunnel behind me which only gradually closed up. Who couldn't enjoy that?

What's so good about the opposite, the steamy, sweaty heat of tropical countries, that makes you want to sit and pant, or to hide inside air-conditioning? Or the squelchy, soggy wet warmth we get so much of? Or the oppressive hot nights of summer in the city?

If I were stuck in a permanently sunny, warm place, I'd try to get hold of a good reproduction of Turner's painting 'Frosty Morning', just to remind myself of what good weather was like. And I'd long for the sound of rain dashed against the windowpanes by a stormy wind.