Tuesday 6th December
Having effectively lived the first seven years of my life in Cyprus, I had never really experienced winter. I cannot remember even being really cold, and the sun always seemed to be shining, at least in my memories. Imagine the shock then, to arrive in rainy London and experience my first dreary wet and windy winter. I just never seemed to be able to get really warm in Putney, there was no heating at all in my bedroom, and it was one of those typical late Victorian houses with the small bedroom at the back open to the elements on three sides, and with a long draughty sash window that used to rattle in the wind and keep me awake, as I clutched the still warm hot water bottle, wrapping my whole little body around it in the hope it would save me from the cold. I felt that somehow I was being punished, not only had we been rather unceremoniously bundled out of what, for a child at least, had seemed Paradise and into noisy, rainy, drab and dreary nineteen-fifties London, but I had lost my father into the bargain. Maybe I mixed up the two things and thought I was being punished for losing my father, as if it had all been my fault, and my particular penance was to suffer these awful winter months of driving rain and snow and frost and biting wind.
As time passed I am sure I got used to it, and began to appreciate the beauty of Winter; the gentle white duvet of freshly fallen snow in the park, the sparkling frost on each blade of grass, the icicles hanging from the gutter neatly in rows and the bare black tree branches against a clear blue sky. I still detested the cold at night though, and have ever since insisted on eiderdowns and counterpanes on my bed, where netted down by the warmth and weight of many layers I at last feel secure and warm.
It is only in my later years that I have even begun to look forward to Winter; I always used to dread it, the end of summer, the passing of Autumn, and the long bleak cold months before the first signs of Spring. But now I no longer fear the winter, but actually look forward to it, that cold wind which takes your breath away, also reminds you that you are alive and so so insignificant against the elements. And what can be better than a walk in the frost and snow, each footstep crushing the new fallen fluffy snow into hard little impressions of your boots, and that first snowfall of the year, when for a few hours you can almost smell it in the air, and then the first floating flurries and the feeling of renewal as they land blotching your face, and reminding you again that at last Winter has arrived.
And besides what good would hating the Winter do, it is, like so much else in life just something we have to go through – maybe just to really appreciate the return of Spring. Edward and I had some friends who literally wintered abroad every year, in the Canaries or the Caribbean, chasing the sun all year round. How awful to never experience the bite of winter, to never be able to return from a really cold walk in the snow and pour yourself a nice hot drink and sit by the window and look out on all this splendour. So no, I no longer hate the Winter at all, even if I still miss Cyprus a bit.