“Climate is what you expect,” the man from the Meteorological Office told me. “Weather is what you get.” In Britain we prefer to talk about the latter — our climate being a rather nebulous thing, best described by the nonplussing word “changeable” — and what we got this week was cold, with temperatures well below the seasonal average, sleet and snow in the north and west.
In the long-running psychodrama of the British weather, cold has played a secondary role of late. Our anxiety has been about the hot weather that might, as a function of global warming, permanently displace that changeability, for which we do have an exasperated affection. (“It just can’t make its mind up, can it?”) And Britain is getting warmer. According to the Met Office, the average mean winter temperature was 3.28C between 1961 and 1990; between 1991 and 2020, it was 4.09C.
Recent cold snaps, though, have been freighted with their own drama, on account of high energy prices. Fuel poverty, often defined as having to spend more than 10 per cent of income on fuel, is currently being experienced by more than half of British homes, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. My own house echoes to my wife’s slamming of the doors (to retain heat in rooms) and we sometimes dine by the light of two faltering candles. Tips on how to keep warm sprout everywhere. In December, John Lewis reported that sales of hot-water bottles were up six-fold; sales of electric blankets were also soaring.
Reading this sort of counsel, I have a strong sense of time-slip. In my 1960s childhood, when our home did not have central heating, I would hug my hot-water bottle as I carried it up to bed; it certainly outranked my teddy bear on a cold winter’s night.
It is said (probably incorrectly) that the Inuit have 50 words for snow. Fifty years ago, when British winters were colder, and only about a third of homes had central heating (as against 95 per cent today), we British employed more cold-related language. “Wrap up warm,” from my parents, was as standard as “goodbye” when I left the house in winter. People would confide in each other about their elderly relations: “She feels the cold terribly, you know.”
And it was axiomatic that if you got cold, you would catch a cold, possibly “Your death of cold” — or, if you came in with cold hands and warmed them under the hot tap, you’d get chilblains. But the more this mysterious condition was invoked, the less I believed in it, so that I came to consider it a mythological threat, like the “lurgi”.
And there was more snow-talk. People tend to think there was more snow in the past because snow is memorable (white Christmases are “like the ones I used to know”), but there really was: between 1971 and 2000, there were on average 12.2 snow-lying days per year; between 1991 and 2020 there were 9.66.
As the sky turned white in, say, 1970, I — wiping the condensation from the window — would make a snap diagnosis. “It’s only sleet”, or “It’s not going to lie” or (triumphantly) “It is lying!”
Cue much activity: the adults making the paths safe to walk on, the children simultaneously making them unsafe by creating a slide. Snow was a regular enough occurrence that we children had come to know our friends’ sliding styles: from the cowards who slid crouching, anticipating a fall, to the narcissists who slid with arms outstretched, to be more aerodynamic. With constant use right up towards bedtime, you could burnish a slide, until it reached its sinister culmination: black ice! There were also sledges to ride, and these were kept close to hand, near the bikes in the garage, not in the attic where I kept ours when my own children were young in the early 2000s. Then came the long, melancholic aftermath, the price you paid for all that fun: slush.
It might be that my nostalgia for cold weather stems from having grown up in Yorkshire. In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson dances around the idea that the cold is idealised in the north of England. He quotes lines evoking “the quintessence of a winter city” from “Poem Written on A Hoarding”, by Sean O’Brien, who resides in Newcastle:
. . . the snow and that white, other city
I can’t recall leaving, or ever re-enter.
Then again, I think Britain as a whole identifies itself as a cold country, which is partly why the loss of that cold is so disturbing. Surely there is more cold than hot in our literature. I don’t recall many heatwaves in the works of the Brontës. I doubt that Sherlock Holmes ever removed his deerstalker to mop his brow. Here — from his short story “The Haunted Man” — is what Charles Dickens could see in a coal fire: “wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies”. In Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese writes that the British resisted the efficient, “fire-concealing” iron stoves adopted elsewhere in northern Europe. We “hated to lose sight of the cheery flames” so we preferred open fires.
Our coal fire gave way to a gas fire — a “gas miser” as my father depressingly called it — in about 1972. For aesthetic reasons, I have put that policy into reverse in every home I’ve owned.
An open fire is — like being thin — one of those things that used to suggest poverty, and now suggests the opposite. There’s one in Claridge’s foyer, for instance. They’re not very efficient: when unlit, cold air comes down the chimney; when lit, much of the heat is lost.
But the upper-class ideal in Britain is to give the cold a fighting chance. Status comes from outdoors — that is, land — so you ought not to insulate yourself too thoroughly from it. That way lies cosseting and cosiness, which is essentially naff. In The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford, the “hons”, a gang of aristocratic girls, convene in the only warm room in Alconleigh, the ramshackle country house where much of the action is set: the airing cupboard.
I walked into New & Lingwood, the poshest of the posh gents’ outfitters in Jermyn Street, in St James’s, London, to ask about those reliably warm, duvet-like padded coats that most people now favour in cold weather.
I spoke to Stefan Obadia, who described himself as “clothier” (“I advise people what to wear”). Did he like those kinds of coats? “No,” he said crisply, “they show nothing of the natural shape of the wearer,” and he suggested that part of the reason people liked them was that they were “shiny”. It is probably unnecessary to add that New & Lingwood does not sell those types of jackets, but rather traditional woollen greatcoats, which are more elegant but less warm.
I myself do not wear a padded jacket, and I admit that my cold weather traditionalism is akin to snobbery. I burn only legal fuels on my fire (the burning of wet wood and non-smokeless house coal was banned in 2021), but I feel guilty about doing so, and I was given cold comfort by a Greenpeace spokesman.
“Burning all coal is a disaster because of carbon,” he said. “Seasoned wood is slightly less toxic than wet wood, but all wood burning emits harmful particle pollution.” He told me that the ideal home, environmentally speaking, would be what’s called “a passive house: effectively a closed system with very well-insulated windows — double- or triple-glazed — and airflow managed by the architecture”. A passive house requires no external energy. “The occupants’ body heat is enough.” The passive house was sounding less like a house than a coffin. I suggested — gauchely, I’m sure — that as the climate warms, energy use for heating might decline. “Perhaps, but it will rise for air-conditioning.”
I’m looking for a happy ending here. It might come from Juliet Nicolson’s recent book Frostquake, about the Great Freeze of 1962-63. She describes how the Freeze “crystallised a growing tension between old and new”, and when the snow finally melted after three months, Britain was a different place. In “the apparent stillness of that snowy winter”, and in light of the Profumo scandal, the Cuban missile crisis, the boom in satire and the rise of The Beatles, Britain had reassessed itself. “Old ways” began to be seen as “wrong ways” of doing things. A metaphorical thaw came, but the book is also a tribute to the cold that preceded it.
Nicolson was eight when the Freeze began, on Boxing Day 1962. She “woke to the peculiar blue-bright light of reflected snow filtering through the closed curtains”. On opening the curtains, “The sight was beautiful, its very transience on this familiar landscape making it even more precious.” It seems that such events will be even more transient in years to come, so they might be more beautiful still.
Andrew Martin’s latest book is ‘Yorkshire: There and Back’ (Corsair)
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