Negotiating winter (Anne Rooney)

This morning there's a slug inside the door and a lot of water outside it. A bit of a brown tinge to the tree over the road. Still not properly light at 6am. We have to face it, summer is over and winter is just around the corner. 

Winter and I have never been friends. I spent my whole childhood with chapped and bleeding knuckles from being out in the cold winds. I remember once dropping a mitten at school, and then about six inches of snow fell. I spent ages hunting (fruitlessly) for it on the playing field. Of course it was fruitless; why didn't anyone tell me that I wouldn't be able to see a mitten under six inches of snow? Now a five-year-old would NOT be allowed to roam a snow-covered field for 20 minutes unsupervised, but that was then...

As this winter sneaks up, I find myself trying to plan whether to carry on working in my garden office, which is warm enough if I turn the heating on before I take MB to school, and cheap enough if I then turn it off and snuggle under a heated throw all day, or whether to go to the University Library which is heated for free but is a cold 5-km cycle ride away and where the coffee is not free. 

Most writers are entirely used to working wrapped in blankets, wearing fingerless gloves and a hat, or sometimes waddling around in a sleeping bag with holes cut for the feet. It's not something we look forward to, though.

 

But this is the year I thought I'd made friends with the cold. I spent part of July in Greenland, exploring pack ice, glaciers, icebergs and the ice sheet in perpetual daylight. In February I hope to go to northern Norway and explore the ice in perpetual darkness (not sure how much exploring will be possible in the dark, though). So why am I now glowering at the thermometer as I shake moths out of my jumpers? 

It puts me in mind of my neighbour, Keith. His wife is very fond of holidays, and books about six a year going to places like the Canary Isles and Portugal — not known for being cold. He says  he has a great time. But if I see him here when it's 28 °C he grumbles that it's too hot, just as I will grumble that a British winter is too cold. 

So perhaps it's down to choice. If I choose to go where the ice is kilometres thick, the cold is part of the deal. If Keith chooses to roast on a beach, it's good that it's hot. 

 

Maybe I need to convince myself I've chosen the cold. I could (in theory) go somewhere warm for the winter months. (OK, I couldn't, but let's pretend Brexit didn't happen and I have endless funds and no school run.) I will choose to think of it as snuggling inside a blankety coccoon. And when I come back from Norway it will seem warm, surely?

For now, I've thrown the slug outside. It can do its own negotiation with winter.

 

 

 

 

 

(Top three photos taken in Ilulissat, Greenland; bottom photo taken in a fjord near Nuuk)

Anne Rooney

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Out 30th September:  Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts, illustrated, by Ro Ledesma, Arcturus