Loving a cold climate.

I don't mind admitting, coming right of my cosy closet in my thermals and insulated slipper socks and confessing: I love snow. For me this recent spate of cold weather is like birthday and Christmas come at once, but mostly like Christmas. As media hysteria reaches boiling point, I turn off the radio and stop looking at the news on the telly - because snow is the news on the telly and I can't stand all those naysayers - and listen to what snow has to say for itself instead. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/03/uk-weather-britain-braced-black-ice-floods-thaw-sets-storm-emma/

It might be loud at first, on the wind, swirling round chimney stacks, darting in and out of smoke plumes, but at some point it's always going to be muffled, a hush that stifles traffic along with all the gloomy thoughts in your head. Flinging open curtains to a street shrouded in snow, I break into a grin. I can't help it: snow's a powdery pick me up.

Snow is such a big cheese, in fact, (definitely a Camembert) that schools get the day off because of it. Pipes freeze and shatter. Boilers give up the ghost. Trains stop. Cars stall. Theatres empty. If you had to describe it to an alien just landed you might say 'snow is a white that covers the world,' but the word white doesn't quite cover it. It's a luminous absence. A colourless sky. A emptying softness. A dust to cover all things, including the bins. Hooray! And then when it melts all the shit is still there underneath. Boo! You don't need a metaphor for snow, snow's a metaphor already.

Come to think of it, it's not just snow that turns me on, it's all proper weather. Give me a winter that roars, following an Autumn that's mush, crowned with a riot of spring; a spring that shoots through soil like a David Attenborough timelapse on speed. Daffodils to make a poet swoon. The blossomest blossom Dennis Potter ever did see...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX2RtDE9BBw

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/12/greatinterviews

Orgies of buds, catkins, pussy willow, bird's nests with blue-speckled eggs in them to satisfy even the fussiest teacher; enough to break a primary school nature table. Followed by a heat in summer so searing it wilts children in playgrounds like corn. Endless evenings of flawless skies, nothing in them but a high circle of swallows. Temperatures to melt candles. Nights so hot you lie awake in nothing but perspiration, thinking about calling out the fire brigade to hose you down.

I don't want cloud, mizzle, damp or drizzle, which is why autumn doesn't really do it for me. I don't want middling days. I want full on, full throttle, turn it up to the max weather. So cold, there isn't a log or a bag of kindling for the fire to be had in the whole of south London because someone got there first and bought it all, or, so hot that every ice-cream and lollypop has been purchased from the corner shop and licked down to its lolly stick by mid-morning. All of which is jolly handy because with climate change here to stay this sort of weather is a lot more likely.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/27/climate-change-human-fingerprint-found-on-global-extreme-weather

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Snow joke.