In Cold Blood
Maggie Simpson was a January baby, no doubt about it.
January babies of the Northern Hemisphere are always cold. Particularly cosseted first children like me born in January, who are wrapped like little sausage rolls from the second they push their little nose out past the perineum straight into layers of wool and towelling and anorakage. For the first six months of their lives they are bound Sarchophagus-like in blankets and quilting, topped off with woolly bonnets and then squeezed into a contraption that is a hybrid coat and sleeping bag. Their skin doesn’t see the sun or feel the air til July, a good seven months after having the vernix washed off it.
When I heard that Michael Jackson had nick named his kid Blanket, I thought, “That should have been my name…”
So I’m cold. Yes, yes, we all are, but I am particularly cold because I’m a January baby and no amount of clothing is ever enough to warm me up. I’ve been away recently to Disneyland and Paris where it was colder than the chest freezer of Satan in his Hades home, and this is what I wore from skin outwards:
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A bra (woot woo)
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A thermal strappy vest
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A long sleeved thermal vest
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A long-sleeved t-shirt
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A short sleeved t-shirt ( I only put it on cos it was there)
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A cashmere jumper
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Another cashmere jumper
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Woolly tights (Regulation issue for all Scottish women past October)
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Jeans
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Four cheese baguettes for sneaking into Disneyland strapped to my body (they don’t let you bring food in but their’s is shit and costs £50 per item and you have to speak French to get it from them)
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A leather jacket
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A padded coat
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Hat
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Gloves
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Scarf (wound around torso for warmth)
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Another scarf (for decorative purposes)
Someone actually thought I was one of the Disney characters I was that padded. I let them take my photo and said nothing.
So I’m a cold January baby born 7th January. I won’t be blogging tomorrow as the mid-life
crisis officially begins and apparently that’s quite time consuming…..
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Love in a Cold Climate
Me and some students standing on the frozen Baltic Sea in Finland in April.
Or Aberdeen Beach yesterday?
You decide.
So here comes the Summer, eh? Everyone seems to think so. Down the beach today I actually saw a gang of lads in swimming trunks swimming in the actual North Sea. And they weren’t even Scandinavian!
But my kids and husband seem to think it’s Summer too. The three of them have been gamboling about in t-shirts for the past two days. Outside!
Me? I’m frozen, peering at them through the window with thermals on, shouting about “neer casting” of “clouts” and “May” being “oot” and “Bewaring the Ides of March” and stuff, whilst pointing a wizened finger at the skies like Michael Fish on bad acid.
I am here in this country through some kind of accident. I must be, I am constantly cold and can only relax once on summer holiday somewhere nearer the Equator. I pray for the day when someone finally admits I was dropped at the front door in a basket by a desperate and frightened visiting Greek teenage circus performer, post partum.
Meeester has been driving me daft all week.
Blessed (erm, possibly) with a thick and unending pelt of body hair, Meeester feels no draught. He has even recently grown a beard to complete the furry coverage100%. He could, if he wanted, pleat the beard hair, weave it into his chest hair (and beyond) and have a full body plait down to the, not inconsiderable, hair on his toes. Let’s hope it never happens, but I tell you, I’m really worried about our future Caribbean school trip in July. Will Meeester be able to resist the lure of the cornrows? (And you just know he’d say yes to beads, as well).
That aside, and back in a colder climate, he insists on opening all windows in the house and the four outside doors as soon as the slimmest and weakest rays of sun hit our patch of the Earth.
I have spent the whole week shutting them, creeping Gollum-like (but with a cardigan on), one minute behind him screaming,
“It was snowing last week!!!!”.
Half an hour later, I’ll feel a surprise and unwelcome arctic blast up my nightie, and notice he’s gone back round the house and opened them all again.
We have been in temperature tussles all week of the Easter Holiday.
He blames my icy blood on my mum. Being a January baby, and the first born, my mother would dress me up like a mini Elk herder from the arctic tundra of Lapland (but in nylon- it was the seventies) , with five layers of clothes, fretting if so much as one inch of me met with the outside air.
Me, I blame Meeester’s family’s obvious lineage to a family of gorillas.
