'Sub-zero temperatures won’t make me a snowflake - I lived through winter 1947'

14 January 2024 , 19:35

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Snow and freezing Arctic winds are set to blast the UK (Image: PA)

Perhaps I should have listened to my late mother, or at least to Mrs R, the sage-in-residence.

“Be careful what you wish for!” would be their common words of advice.

Last Monday I sighed nostalgically for the winter days of childhood, with snow and ice I’ve only lately seen on Christmas cards. One week later, in line with much-derided female intuition, leaden clouds fill the sky.

Paul the BBC weatherman predicts a serious cold spell. The mercury could go down to at least minus 4 C, and we might get several inches (or centimetres, anyway) of the white stuff in the hills, which means round ’ere.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

Gales, snow and rain to batter country today with 80mph wind gusts

As a three-year-old, I lived through the winter of 1947 in an unheated terraced house. In January 1963, I hitch-hiked every night from Nottingham to Wakefield and back to see my new daughter.

And her mother, better known later as Mrs R. That was the year that snow lay on the ground for many months, and my hair used to freeze every time I got out of a warm cab – my lifts were almost always from lorries – to stand hopefully at the next roundabout.

It would make a good comedy. Carry On Thumbing! Cold is good for you, say the experts, perks up the body. And anything has to be better than the recent weeks of continuous rain that put a real dampener on spirits.

It was chilly but bright over the weekend. The real hit is coming later today and tomorrow. We shall see.

Meanwhile, let’s dig out the heavy woollen sweater my kid sister knitted for me some time in the 20th century.

Home-made, home-warm, I say.

Paul Routledge