Liking Winter

There are many who will believe the following statement to be certifiable, especially on a December day when the north wind is whipping down across the Welsh mountains to cross the Bristol Channel and finish its mission by making the West Country tremble… 

But I like winter. 

At least, people like me enjoy the winter until its novelty wears thin. Come the end of January we will have had enough and be yearning for the first signs of spring. 

But right now the newness and rawness of winter still looms large, cold and loud. If anything, the Met Office weather warnings seem to offer more of a promise than a threat, especially if you’ve protected yourself with cupboards full of comestibles and plenty of dry logs for the fire. 

How I laugh nowadays when I don all manner of amazing waterproof cold-weather gear while remembering what it was like to walk to school in the Big Freeze of early 1963. 

Shorts, and blue knees that stung in the wind until they went numb. A woollen bobble hat that stopped just short of the ears, meaning that the lobes would provide you with an acute version of toothache. 

What the hell were we doing walking to school through the freezing snow in shorts? Maybe it was character-building, but I am not convinced by that. 

What I do remember is being a “milk monitor” because we lived in the village where the primary school was located and not in one of the outlying communities - which meant kids like me could get in early to carry the crates of school-milk around to the classrooms. 

In the Big Freeze the milk froze in the bottles so it expanded and the creamy top pushed up through the gold cap to become a dairy flavoured stalagmite.

I can still feel the cold of those steel crates on my gloveless fingers. And I can still recall the relief I felt that I wouldn’t have to drink the wretched stuff because it was a lump of ice that would do weird things like separate when it thawed.

This might sound like the most miserable-old-git thing I will ever say in this column - but I do not think British kids today know the meaning of cold like we used to know it.  

For a start, we don’t get winters that have to be named “The Big Freeze” any more. The UK falls into a panic if even the slightest dusting of snow is mentioned in the forecast. 

Then there’s the fact that so few kids actually walk to school. Yes, some do - but have you ever driven past a village primary school at kicking-out time? It’s like watching Top Gear on steroids. 

School buildings have radiators and underfloor heating. Which is a long way from the concrete prefab classrooms of my day when a stinking fuming coal stove heated the teacher and no one else. 

When we got home to the council estate, the Cornish Unit we lived in was even worse. I have spent nights in minus 40c temperatures in the Yukon that were more comfortable. 

Even the most basic homemade log-cabin has more potential to be warm than a Cornish Unit. The only upside was the beauty of the ice-flowers that would grow on the inside of the windows. 

My father’s theory was that these ugly, inefficient, buildings had been specially designed to make staying at home so undesirable, the working classes would always be keen to swap a cold bed for a warmer coalface. 

Because poverty came as part of the equation, there wasn’t much joy to be had once you’d suffered frostbite after school by sledging down the West Somerset pistes on empty fertiliser bags. One cheap and attainable pleasure was to collect the picture cards that came inside a box of PG Tips - and these would give an imaginative child glimpses of a world where icicles didn’t exist. I still have an album entitled something like Tropical Birds of South East Asia.

So you’d dream. And dream and dream. That one day you might go to a hot place where Birds of Paradise flaunted their technicolour stuff.  

It took me decades, but the first time I ended up in such a place I spent hours pinching myself long and hard to make sure I really was lying on my back in a blood-warm sea looking up at frigate birds cruising through the wafting palms. 

Me. A council house kid from an area that’s just been named one of the worst in the UK when it comes to upward mobility (whatever that means), cheating winter by swanning about in some tropical paradise… 

It’s been an annual mission ever since. 

But then, as that novelty began to wear thin, I realised that - whether I like it or not - I truly am a creature of the wind-whipped West Country moors. Put me on the most beautiful Caribbean island imaginable and within a month I’d be feeling homesick for the big black skies of winter lording it over stark landscapes hunkered down for the chill.  

I’d miss the strange distant soughing among the trees up on the ridge, and the laughter of the flocks of long tailed tits that scour this valley in December. I’d miss the crystal-clear light you get when the sun is so low and the glow from the logs on the fire. 

I’d miss the closing of the curtains and the December darkness that throws into great relief those very first gleams of of change when the Earth spins and begins that long long journey back to summer.