SO everyone's predicting a very cold winter. Or at least the long range weather forecasters are; those people who have thousands of pounds worth of equipment to tell us what future weather we have in store. Maps and satellites and computers and records going back to the year dot. Oh, and before I forget, they've pointed out that there are a lot of berries around this year which proves that Mother Nature is providing a feast for the birds so that they survive a mini ice age. Odd really, that despite the equipment, our sophisticated weatherpersons turn to berries as well as satellites. Rather touching. This is, of course, country lore. You can hear it all over the country. If it's not berries it's something else. Ye old ivy is turning its leaves southward so a cold northern wind is coming. The seaweed's turned wet so rain is a'comin in. Red sky at night, shepherds' delight. Or Farmer George's barn is burning down. Even in these modern times there are still old countrymen and women who will stand by the garden gate and sniff the wind and tell you rain is on its way or that it'll snow before midday. But it's just as likely that if you ask an old farmer what the weather is going to do tomorrow that he'll tell you it's going to be a force niner with hailstones because he heard Craig Rich say so on the television. Still, although I rather doubt that Mother Nature is benign enough to provide the little birdies with a feast while freezing the backside off the rest of us, I rather miss cold winters. Or is that just seeing the past from the rose coloured spectacle point of view? Yes and no. Yes because crisp frosty days, with leaves crackling underfoot and bright sunshine, are wonderful. Yes because you could skate on the ponds, jump on nice crunchy puddles and make snowmen almost every year, rather than once in a month of Sundays. My grandmother used to say 'put your coat on or you won't feel the benefit', which was an odd saying that meant you wouldn't feel the benefit of a nice warm house when you came back indoors and took your coat off. I always thought you'd feel the benefit even more if you'd been shivering without a coat. Not that houses were all that warm. If you were lucky you had a coal fire in the sitting room, which warmed a sort of semi-circle in front of the fireplace. People fought for the premiere spot in front of it, and children usually lost out. If it was a big room, the outer fringe was ice-box cold, as were all other parts of the house apart from the kitchen. We had an old fashioned 'kitchener', a sort of down-market Rayburn, which was fed with coal and kept the whole room warm. Small wonder everyone congregated in the kitchen. When my mother decided to go all modern and buy an electric cooker my grandmother was horrified and practically chained herself to her beloved kitchener. Which was strange because she was always the one to complain about how difficult it was to light, how it needed black leading on a daily basis and how its oven had a mind of its own and either burnt everything underneath or didn't cook at all. Now she declared that electricity was dangerous, expensive and would be the death of all of us when the wires became live and set fire to the house. My mother ignored her and had a cooker installed and for weeks they cooked separately, gran on one side over the kitchener, my mother on the other over the electric stove. One grilled, the other carried on incinerating. One extolled the joy of being able to control the heat on the rings so that eggs didn't necessarily have to have black frilly rings round their whites, the other claimed that no electric stove could cook things 'through' properly and we were all destined for some form of deadly food poisoning. My mother won only because the chimney caught fire and great lumps of burning soot fell all over one of my grandmother's unusual stews and the sweep told us the chimney needed relining. Upstairs, the bathroom and bedrooms were never heated. The latter usually had fireplaces but these were never lit unless someone was seriously ill. Indeed, it was a very frightening thing to lie in bed with a cold or some other malady and suddenly hear the sound of someone lighting the fire. It was the next best thing to getting a visit from the grim reaper. Very few houses had central heating and it wasn't unusual to visit people in winter and find them wearing overcoats indoors, topped by scarves and woolly hats. People wore lots more clothes in those colder days and didn't cast their clouts till May, whether the month or the shrub, was out. Vests, substantial undergarments, thick stockings, mittens, with two or three layers of wool on top. The current obsession with sex and seduction would have been severely curtailed in winter months with all those layers of clothing. And anyway, who wanted to risk getting chilblains? Wool was definitely the order of the day. With a mother who knitted non-stop and unpicked things to knit other things, I was covered from head to foot in wool garments from the day I was born. I don't think I stopped itching until I was 16. Today we are rarely cold indoors, except those who walk around in crop tops and whimper because the central heating isn't high enough. I'm looking forward to a good cold snap in the garden to rid it of its resident slug population, which has been lulled into a sense of security by mild winters. And who doesn't love snow? The cats go mad, so do I, and the garden looks wonderful in its white blanket. I particularly love that eerie silence when you wake up to find that it has snowed in the night, a kind of magical silence which only lasts until the children get up and you know you're going to spend the rest of the day thawing out little blue fingers and mopping up snowball debris and run out of gloves. The shops, of course, will run out of bread and milk, and the cats, having never seen much snow, will go potty for ten minutes and then discover it is wet and cold and disappear into the nearest hot spot. One thing is that we'll have plenty to talk about if the cold snap arrives. We British love talking about our weather, and let's face it, we have plenty to talk about. Although Eskimos are supposed to have dozens of words for snow, we can beat them on rain, mist, hail, wind, fog, drizzle, breezes, gales, downpours. We can all remember the worst winter, the best summer, the heaviest rain, the longest period without rain, the last hose pipe ban (probably coinciding with the heaviest rain) and the rest. Give us a nice hot country and we're lost for words. On holiday this year my son, obviously missing his daily weather talk, said the same thing each morning. 'Looks like being another nice day', he would utter as he looked up at the bright blue sky. Every evening he said 'It's been another nice day, hasn't it?' After four days my daughter threatened to chuck him in the pool if he said it again. I am at the moment in Devon, which is in the middle of its carnival season. While carnivals in Cornwall seem to be on the decline, they have never been stronger here and most villages have their own carnival committees and the annual events are somewhat akin to Notting Hill. Even if the weather is dreadful, as it was this past Saturday, the show goes on. Great. I'm fairly glad to be out of the house because someone is in painting mood. No, not an Amateur Picasso, but white gloss. As I left I had to sidle past doors, window frames, radiators and anything which wasn't moving which was now white and wet. One of the cats Velcroed itself to a radiator and had to be peeled away and I think the ginger one had done the same in the night because there was a nice hairy ginger fringe round the larder door. Methinks I'm best staying over the border for the time being.
