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.
