Things You Never See Anymore

Winters with prolonged periods of snow lying. Bastard Baltic temperatures that lasted. Then a slight thaw and hated refreeze. Slipping and sliding with every step. Even as a fit, agile, with perfect balance and hair, kid, I ended up on my arse many times.

Fern patterns of frost on the windows, although close to death in my bedroom, I always loved looking at them close up, until the icy hands of death would force me back under the covers and a few coats. Billy Connolly wasnt kidding. The tops of bottle of milk freezing in the doorstep.

The snow lying long enough to make death defying downhill slides, normally ending onto a busy road. Get a sledge on it, 8 of you pile on and it's a 50/50 chance you receive up to and including fatal injuries.

Leaving the living room with the fire on and the drop in temperatures momentarily removes your ability to breathe. Toilet visits were brief. The dreaded bedtime walk along the hall, then into your somehow even colder room. Into a bed, whose sheets felt as though they had crystallised ice covering every square millimeter. Going in and that horror of waiting for your body heat to raise the temperature enough to reach a survivable level. My bedroom was so cold, the SAS used it for Artic training, when the trains were off. We lost a lot of good men in there.

Building Snowmen that could take a fortnight to return to the earth. Nothing of what was once a proud and volumous chap, that was now no more than a disintegrating carrot, a scarf and a couple of stones, lying abandoned. I always felt a bit sad as a kid when they disappeared. Once we built an Igloo, but that's another story.
 
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