Ghosts of winters past

Pretty, innit? Snow on Newhaven Harbour, with the Forth Bridges in the distance. A good cue to get me started, as the Forth Road Bridge was closed for a time last week because of snow/ice/not-gritting-lest-the-bridge-is-corroded-by-salt. Now the country is closed, it seems - all these poor souls stuck on the M8 yesterday, and perhaps still as far as I know. Could have been us, too - but we left Edinburgh on Sunday, when the road was absolutely clear. Someone loves us ...

But to my theme. It's obvious why yesterday's terrible stramash happened: people rose early for work, as the world now seems to do, saw that it was dry - and set off. When they were on their way, strung along the ends of the motorway or whatever, the snow began. Someone jack-knifed; they all ground to a halt. Result: blocked road. Gritters couldn't get along it. No point in whining that folk ought to have stayed at home, as several moaners did on Radio Scotland this morning. They didn't have the choice when they set out. Perhaps the gritter moguls should have trusted the weather forecast and sent the lorries out early - but that's easy to say now. Besides, it was apparently too cold for the salt to have much effect - certainly the bit of path I spilled water on while emptying a basin (our waste pipe was frozen) is now a sheet of ice, despite my immediate application of salt at the time.

I don't remember this massive disruption from my past. I do remember fierce winters - for heaven's sake, I can just remember a morning when we had a coal briquette in the range surrounded with potato peelings*, in what must have been the winter of 1947 when the pipes in the tenements all froze and people had to use stand pipes in the streets. I can remember being sent home from school when the outside lavatories froze - the joy when the jannie would appear in the classroom with his mop in his hand and whisper to the teacher and we'd all go home just after playtime. (Presumably our bladders were supposed to last till we got home). I remember the joy of sledging all alone when I was home and my pals weren't - the virgin snow above the old air-raid shelters in Novar Drive. And of course I remember the brown sugar of the old snow in Great Western Road, and trudging up the hill in the snow to the number 10 tram terminus. And there were wonderful patterns of ice on the inside of the windows in the mornings - ferns, mainly, and starbursts. They were especially beautiful in the small maid's room off the kitchen where I slept, I remember. And I was the lucky one - the range in the kitchen kept the temperature in my wee room bearable.

Of course it must have been bad. And writing this has answered my question to myself, now I think about it. I saw only the effect on me. We didn't have a car, and there were trams (though I don't know how well they functioned in snow, and now there's no-one alive in my family who can tell me, dammit). We were accustomed to put on multiple layers of clothing and walk. We had wellies - though once I had a warmer pair of boots, in blue leather with crepe soles to which the snow clung in such layers that walking became impossible. We made fantastic slides in the playground and hurled ourselves along them; we were consumed with rage when the janny salted them while we were in class (presumably they had rudimentary Health & Safety even then). I loved the snow, my parents didn't seem unduly perturbed by it, we didn't have to worry about loved ones who were driving across the country/flying to London/travelling to Paris. My father had the longest commute - from Hyndland to Springburn - every day, and the rest of us took the tram, about 4 stops, I think.

Maybe we expected less. Our shopping was local, our messages limited to what we could carry. The shops had basics, and seasonal basics at that. When I was really small, we still had rationing. We had powercuts and candles, coal fires and a range in the kitchen. I can remember my mother cooking on it in a powercut. We all had chilblains every winter. It must have been grim, and I would probably hate it now.

We did, however, survive - and I look back on my childhood winters with undiluted pleasure. But excuse me while I go and turn up the heating ...

*This was, I believe, because the stockpiles of coal were frozen solid and no coal could be taken off them.

Great expectations

Presumably our expectations about life these days give rise to all the panic we see about ...well, snow. I have childhood memories of huge snowbanks at the sides of Glasgow streets, and of being sent home early because the (outside) school toilets were frozen; of wonderful sledging on these unexpected free afternoons because of aforementioned plumbing crises; of launching myself intrepidly down slides in the playground before the janny ruined them with salt. But I don't recall the trams going off, or being kept at home because it was too snowy to travel to school (half an hour away, if you walked).

But now we expect to be cocooned in our cars until the last possible moment when we go anywhere; we expect to whizz along motorways at insane speeds; we expect planes to shake off the shackles of earth without worrying about the improbability of landing safely on black ice - and when something makes this difficult or impossible we go into hyperbolic mode and talk as if the end of the world had come.

I'm as bad, in my own way: if I want to speak to someone and they're not either at home to answer the phone or responding immediately to their mobile, I feel irritation closely followed - if it's family - by panic: is their phone ringing out in a crashed car? Where are they? Why are they out in the snowy dark with a 2 year old when they should be safely at home with In the Night Garden?

So tomorrow, in penance for all this exaggerated expectation, I shall join in further gritting of our church drive (apparently our labours yesterday have produced miraculous improvement; we just need to do it further up) so that we can have our lovely Midnight Mass tomorrow. And then I hope to drive sedately along the M8 to join my family for Christmas dinner. It's been an interesting Advent of flu, cancellations and anxiety followed by relief as family travelled the country to be with us - it would be good to relax for a bit. Especially if someone else is doing the cooking ...

Snow dahn sahth

I'm having an adventure break. Not in Tenerife, yet, but in London, in the snow. We arrived last night clad, as it was pointed out, for a ski-ing holiday in boots and fleecy hats; I had thought that the gear might look a tad odd in South London, but no. Our first thrill came when the cabbie balked at the side roads and dropped us off to walk to the house - about half a mile of rutted, frozen snow, dragging a suitcase and struggling to maintain momentum every time we came to the slightest incline. We made it, though I felt as I used to after a couple of hours of sledging.

This morning we went out with the pram - for coffee, for exercise and fresh air, and for the shopping. McIntoshes are not easily deterred from the important things in life, especially the first two. The photos show us nearing the house. As it rained in the night, the car-tracks in the middle of the road have actualy thawed a little, and that is where we walked some of the time. But the pavements are still lethal - and there is no sign of grit on them. I recall the stushie in the Dunoon Observer after the sudden cold snap a the beginning of December - all these complaints that only one side of the road had gritted pavements and so on. Dunoon, I have news for you. London is ten, twenty - fifty times worse. This is like life in '50s Glasgow, when the snow lay till it turned to brown sugar and your slides stayed slippy for days on end.

As you can see, Mr B used the pram to overcome his horror of icy roads; I pretended I was in New York and found I got used to the motion after a bit. It feels a bit as I imagine Tai Chi does - all that controlled effort. But I'd hate to be one of these frail elderly folk I saw near the supermarket, with no-one to help them and no pram to hold onto. They looked terrified. Apparently it's just not worth it to have snowploughs and gritting lorries for such infrequent snow - but a grit bin on every corner? Surely.

Once again, Blogger is proving tricky to format - hence the widowed "I'm" above. Put it down to a visual representation of a break, please...

If winter comes ...

I associate this time of year, rather oddly, with looking at houses. Specifically, houses and flats in Glasgow in January 1970, with a view to buying somewhere to live after our wedding that summer. One of the most heartening aspects of what was frequently a depressing process was the fact that it was still daylight after work, and that we weren't always looking at these houses in the dark. The photo above was taken this afternoon in the slightly snowy Bishop's Glen - at about 3.45pm, I think. That's what the light actually was like - I've been fiddling with exposures but wanted the real thing as well.

But later, I had to go down to the shops. At 4.40pm the sky had cleared and it was still light - light enough for the big cumulus that had passed to have a bright whiteness about it against the pale sky. A bright star - presumably a planet - reminded us that night was coming, but I felt that same lift of the spirits as I did on the house-hunting days. And by the second half of February - birthday-party time when my boys were small - the sun will still be visible at coming-home-from-school time and Spring will be on the way. Cheers!

There came both ice and snow ....

A snowy morning in NY lacks the luminosity of the same weather in Scotland. Perhaps being on the 24th floor makes a difference – halfway into the clouds, really. I peer down at St Bartholomew’s dome and the yellow taxis crawling along the white street and realise that there is still stuff falling – the dreaded “frozen rain” of the forecast. It lands in little hard lumps on the window ledge and stays there. Obviously no rise in the temperature, then.

Fearful of venturing too far in streets turned suddenly lethal, we plan a circuit of interesting places within sliding distance. St Patrick’s Cathedral is huge, warm and atmospheric. There are huddled bundles on some of the pews; they may be praying but are almost certainly there for a heat. No-one disturbs them. St Bartholomew’s, the Episcopal church below our window, is dark and strangely unappealing, though we find the restaurant in their “Great Hall” at just the right time. They serve fries in flowerpots, but I manage to avoid temptation. The red tiled path outside by now is suicidally slippy and we clamber instead over the lateral moraines of cleared snow. We visit the Museum of Modern Art – a huge Anglepoise lamp appeals – and hear a wonderful choral Evensong in St Thomas’, Fifth Avenue. This last is a bonus: I have mistaken our direction and we end up outside the church five minutes before the service.

By this time the pavements (sorry – sidewalks) have been cleared perhaps half a dozen times. The precipitation has ceased (in other words the frozen rain, hail and snow are no longer timesharing) and the sky is clearing as darkness falls. Where the clearing has been most efficient, it is impossible to cross the road without braving either a deep pool of brown slush or a mountain of frozen stuff. The less favoured roads are covered in a soupy mixture of slush and salt, through which the traffic slithers and honks. Pedestrians – rather like Glaswegians – jaywalk at every crossroads, cursing in a variety of languages as the soup closes over their shoes. They are shod in every manner of footwear from wellies to stilettos. Businessmen and fur-clad women vie with Rohan-wearing tourists (us) for the shallows. I have never seen so many fur coats – don’t know if this is because I live in the sticks or if it’s an American thing.

We dine out again. It is Valentine’s Day and the hotel is very busy. We brace ourselves for the after-dark cold and make our way along Lexington to find a family-run Italian recommended by the concierge. It is excellent and very atmospheric, with an air of triumph as if we had all braved something just to be there. By the time we leave, it is colder than ever – 17 degrees Fahrenheit, someone says. The slush is freezing again, and there are gangs of men on small tractor-like machines pushing it into piles. Some are shovelling. They don’t seem to be wearing hats – I seem to have had mine glued to my head all day. I haven’t been so cold since I was a child – that hot-eared, dry-skinned, frozen feet feeling.

I no longer want to crack the windows in the hotel.

Trials of a Domestic Goddess (1)

Slipping briefly (I hope) into DG role, I wish to share, gentle readers, the trials of icing the Christmas Cake in this, the Year of Our Lord 2006. The (1) in the title represents a superstitious gesture to the jealous gods who would doubltess heap more trials on my head if I even suggested there would be no more.

What I have to tell you will make most sense if you can remember snow in Glasgow - or some similar city - in the 1950s. ( I know this rules out all but a minority of the bloggership, but bear with me) Snow used to lie. For weeks. Shopkeepers would brush "their" bit of pavement, jannies would spoil good slides in the playground by putting salt on them, but given a decent, pre-global warming cold spell in January, the snow would remain, turning gradually a strange fawn colour and changing texture as it thawed and refroze, so that it resembled demerara sugar in its discoloured graininess.

Why am I telling you this? Because that's what my cake is like. It is no longer possible to buy in Dunoon the unrefined icing sugar which is the preferred taste at The Blethers. So this afternoon, having forgotten to look for the stuff when abroad in Edinburgh, I made my own. Unrefined granulated sugar in the coffee grinder. The kitchen filled with puffs of sugar, the bowl with a pale fawn dust with bits in it. By the time I'd ground a pound of the stuff, I had lost the will to be fussy. And then I added a couple of drops of 33 year old glycerine. I know this because I've had the same bottle since my first cake, when I was expecting infant number one. I think glycerine keeps.....And so it is, best beloved, that we shall have a cake iced with the snow of childhood, crunchy bits and all.

And just a faint aroma of coffee......