We're well past the shortest day and into the New Year and though February can be a grim month, I think the realisation of both those things right now is a bit of a yipee moment.
In theory, I don't mind winter. It's a time I get a lot done in my clients' gardens - putting in new structures, dividing and moving things around and a lot of tidying up, not forgetting weeding out the little thugs that never seem to stop reproducing, before spreading loads and loads of well rotted horshe (as my mother's cousin, a retired military man accustomed to minding his language, called it). And long hard winters decimate the nasties, we're told (though I'll bet they're as efficient as the good ones at finding places to lurk until it's safe to come out and start munching on the best plants in the spring).
Also, there's something masochistically gratifying about working outside when sensible people are snuggled up against their radiators with furry boots and big, soft jumpers on.
And the light - it's multi-mooded. Winter light gives the monochrome landscape an edge you don't get in Summer with lines softened and smudged by colour. When the ground is frost-silvered and hills cast low, narrow shadows, the bare trunks of trees stand serenely like self-confident nudes, oblivious to the cold.
That's the theory. In reality, by now, I'm sick to death of all the layers I have to put on to do the slightest thing outside. When I'm working it's worse - the spares I have to load into the car: armfuls of leggings, jackets, tops, scarves and hats, socks, gardening gloves and spare boots. Then, just as I'm getting stuck into the middle of a mud desert, my mobile rings. If it can make itself heard through the layers, for some reason I'm compelled to track it down. In cold, wet wind I've got leggings on. The theory is that you put your hand through the slit over your hip, designed to match up with the trouser pocket underneath. If the phone's in a pocket down the leg of my combats, there isn't a hope. If I were a contortionist, I'd not be able to bend enough in all that clothing. I stab my fork grumpily into the ground and strip off unco-operative wet gloves, slimey with mud and I begin to search for it, groping with the other hand among the layers of fabric round my neck for my specs, so I can see the name on the screen. Usually the last phase is purely academic and the caller long gone....
I don't know if we're suffering global warming, or if we are, whether it's natural or man-made. To my unscientific mind there are arguments on either side and I'm a bit like the tennis ball in a particularly aggressive match, being bounced from one side to the other, whether I like it or not. Either way, it's taken us too long to notice that we're doing our best to make things worse.
What I do know is that this winter reminds me of the old days. Walking the dogs this morning it was nearly warm. I decided to go up, rather than across the gentle hills that back this town to the East. No rain, but the light was dull and remnants of a more spiteful wind whisped round my ears as we walked higher than we have in a while. Despite that it was bliss to leave my hat and gloves behind and there was extra happiness in the dogs as they bounced from one fresh scent to the next.
We're still weeks from Spring and just a couple of days ago the ground was unforgiving and hard, sharply ridged with frozen ripples of mud left over from when the heifers thundered around in their last games before being shut up for the winter. It was bitter and I risked turning my ankles at every step. The Gremlin's enthusiastic pounces on molehills had become much more wary after a couple of head-on collisions with rocks masquerading as freshly turned earth.
Before that, in the weeks before Christmas, the hills had been covered in snow. Proper snow, lying inches thick on the ground and on every branch and twig. Beautiful. The first morning it was powdery, crunchy under foot. There's something about snow makes the dogs excited and even the DD forgot her dignity and danced, pausing only to chomp mouthfuls of dog ice-cream. The Gremlin quickly picked up snowballs on her legs, so much so that her front legs fused together in just a few yards and when she ran, being a go-for-it sort of character, somersaulted over and over, but kept trying. I skied my feet along to make a path for her, because she made it clear that being carried wasn't in the plan, but even so she kept striking out gamely on her own, scrambling and rolling out across virgin territory.
I've only known snow like this once before in the 28 years I've lived in the South West. Usually it lasts here, at best, for a couple of days and tracks wear through to muddy grass by the first afternoon. This time it lay in such a thick carpet that for once the sledgers and boarders had a good week. Dog walkers were joined on the hill by hundreds of people that probably never set foot up there from one year to the next - and in fact might have thought twice about what they were doing in December if they'd known about the piles of poo of all kinds lying in wait under all the innocent whiteness.
It all reminds me of the Winters of childhood, when scientists taught that another ice age was on the way. People just put snow chains on their cars and got on with it. Farmers hitched up snow blowers and cleared the lanes so the milk would get through and life went on, pretty much as normal ...except schools allowed girls to wear trousers to school.
Whether this is a normal chain of events or not, it's noticeable that - having promised drought, heatwaves, warmer winters during the hardest one since records began, for the second year running - the Global Warming lot has renamed itself the Climate Change lobby.
Whatever is going on and whatever the weather throws up, this year and in the future, we have no choice but to look forward and I like the gardeners' saying - every disaster should be looked at as an opportunity...
No comments:
Post a Comment