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.
Snails Go Home!
It’s wet up North.
It’s the first of flipping July and it’s like that John Carpenter film, “The Fog”. Why? Because it’s all foggy, silly!
Anyway mist and fog are primo snail hunting conditions. Yes, you thought I was just making it up about the Let’s Find Out if We Have Homing Snails Experiment. All mouth and no trousers, you thought. (Note to new readers, you may have to click the link to understand, I’m too lazy to summarise).
Not at all, I have yellow (non-toxic, animal rights activist) paint and brush (not made from badger hair, animal rights activists) and I’m ready to number the snails and relocate. I tell you, it’s not as straightforward as it might seem, painting numbers on snails. As Julia Robert’s character, Vivien, in “Pretty Woman” so rightly said, they are, “Slippery little suckers!”
Meet Linford and Zola
Anyway, I’ve numbered and rehomed about 40 of them. To be honest, not all shells were big enough for numbers and I just put a yellow splodge. I also managed to do this before Male Neighbour I’m Not That Keen On came out and questioned my sanity.
So now…we sit and wait.
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Talking of Mist and Fog…a wee true story for you told to me by my sister-in-law about a friend of hers (it’s always a friend of a friend, isn’t it?). Let’s call the friend Angie. (Shhh! I suspect it was my sister in law…)
Angie is driving home from work along a country road. It is still light but the weather is quite bad. All of sudden she sees a cop car behind her. The cop car switches on the blue lights.
“What the blazes?” she thinks, and pulls over.
An older policeman comes up to the driver’s window and she winds it down to see what he wants.
He utters no greeting. He simply says, “What do we do when Mister Fog appears?”
“Patronising Bastard. Do I look like a 4 year old? I’m not having this” she thinks.
So she looks him straight in the eye and says, very sarcastically, “Well Officer, I’d put Mister Headlights on…”
The policeman looks at her, not quite understanding. Then he looks a little bit annoyed.
“Madam, let me re-phrase that. What should you do when Fog or Mist appears?”
She didn’t need to put her headlights on after that, as her burning cheeks lit the way home.
