Winter: You Suck

As a species, I believe we are split into two firm categories – those who love summer, and those who love winter. I fall squarely into the former group, mainly out of a hatred for the nasties that winter brings. This is for a number of experience-based reasons.

For starters, getting soaked is something that should only happen by choice:

It is not a pleasant experience to be made dripping wet when you don’t expect it, and winter is an expert at exposing you to such horrors.

While rain can be an unpredictable beast at the best of times, in winter it manages to excel itself. While you assume an inconspicuous layer of white cloud in the sky means a rain free day awaits you, winter is planning how best to ensure your unplanned dampness. Without warning, the sky will darken into a writhing mass of the darkest grey cloud, awaiting the perfect moment to fling its wet arsenal at your unprepared body. 

For the last three days, winter’s perfect moment has been planned for the 15 second dash I have to make between the office and the car park. Maintaining a 100% record for each of my days at work this week, the sky had completed its transformation from friendly to threatening with half an hour of my day left to go, leaving ample time for the rain to start falling in a deluge that quite frankly, was unnecessary given that I had to go out in it.

Typically, I had wrongly assumed that I wouldn’t need any form of water-resistance device when I left the house that morning, but even if I had, there is no item of protection that would have been able to stand the aqua-laden onslaught I had to face to get back to my car. You see, the short journey from office to vehicle involves travelling between two buildings which, I have recently learnt, means the slightest breeze is transformed into a howling gale as it travels down the resulting tunnel. Science says that when you add water to such a scenario, you will get horizontal rain (actually, I don’t know if science does officially say that, but it has happened consistently this week so I’m running with it).

Horizontal rain is the worst kind of rain. Not only is it wet, it means that there is a lot of wind around in order to perpetuate its horizontalness. And I hate wind too.

Sitting next to each other in the alphabetically ordered list of weather, wind and winter have formed a strong friendship and go hand in hand everywhere they go. I always seem to forget about how much I hate wind until the final part of the year approaches and it raises its whirling head once again.

There is no protection you can take from it – it lives to ensure you look flapped and ruffled whenever you cross paths. It will blow plastic bags into your face, and leaves into your hair and there is nothing you can do about it.

Unless you stay inside of course, but that is a rather impractical attitude to take for an entire season (especially for me, given that we live at the top of a particularly blustery hill). But even if you did elect a complete avoidance tactic by hibernating in your lounge for several months, you would have to endure its constant whining as it performs laps of your house at top speed, knocking all your stuff over as it goes. There is no relief from the gusts of a potent wind, and that sucks.

Snow sucks too (I’m on a roll now). I used to love snow when I was a kid – hell, even when I was a student, waking up to the sight of a lightly dusted winter wonderland would never fail to put a smile on my face. I think mainly, this was because it never really snowed properly until last winter. For about a month, our road was covered in a slippery carpet of partly-melted-then-refrozen-again snow. Remember I said we lived at the top of a hill? Yeah, that came into play.

 

 

Last winter’s snow did indeed leave me having to plod up a hill barefooted because my heels did not succeed where the car tyres failed. I got home tired, miserable and worst (but most obvious) of all, I had cold feet. I’ll let you in on a little secret – it is impossible for me to be warm if my feet are cold, and walking directly on snow is not a recommended method for keeping the tootsies toasty.

While I will not deny that these are all things I seriously dislike about winter, they are mere inconveniences sent to challenge me every year rather than forming the real reason for my hatred of all things winter. The reason for dislike turning into hatred is simple.

Winter weather does horrible things to my hair.

Winter, you make my hair look bad. We were never destined to be friends.

Before I finish up here, I will begrudgingly admit to being a fan of the occasional positive point that winter brings. I have come up with a grand total of one so far. When it is cold outside, the water from the cold tap is refreshingly cold.

There you go, I said it. There is something good about winter.

But before you get carried away thinking that this could be the humble beginnings of a change in seasonal allegiance, I can reassure you that I can't help but see a negative to this single, lonesome positive. Because the colder water means it takes longer to boil when you’re gasping for a cup of hot, soul-warming tea. And I do hate being made to wait for a steaming hot cuppa.

Winter, you suck because you make my hair bad and you delay my tea drinking.

I rest my case.

Trick, Treat or Nothing (The Inconsistencies of Halloween)

It will probably not have passed you by that it was Halloween yesterday – the time of year when children dress up and run around the street begging their neighbours for sweets before racing home and crashing out as the effects of the sugar rush begin to fade away.

Or do they? I’m damned if I can tell based on our experiences over the last three years. 

Having lived in a flat with Fiance when we first moved in together, trick or treaters were never a phenomenon we had to deal with, so we weren’t particularly enamoured with the concept of having our evening interrupted on a frequent basis in order to satisfy the community’s craving for sugar. In fact, for that first year, I believe we took the easy option and elected to go out for the night, so we didn’t have to face the potential legions of greedy children knocking on our door with their outstretched witch-green hands.

Two years ago, we decided we would face 31^st October in our own home, subject to the persistent knock of the trick or treaters. We went all out for it – by which I mean I bought lots of sweets that we could bribe the mini-vampires with to ensure they wouldn’t cover our front door with eggs. We sat on the couch, bag of sweets in hand awaiting the first knock on the door.

We waited all night. Not one trick or treater graced our doorstep to sample the delightful array of sugary goodies we had waiting for them. This wasn’t what we had been expecting given that our house is in a friendly neighbourhood, with a garden that backs onto a scout hut that attracts plenty of noisy little blighters on a weekly basis.

Last year, we drew on the 2008 experience and didn’t buy anything. Not a single sweet treat was purchased in order to participate in the festivities. Needless to say, we flew into a panic when the first knock on the door came, leading me to embark on a frantic scrabble through the kitchen to find anything suitable that we could placate the children with. 

After much scrambling, I found half a bag of sweets left over from the year before and shoved into a cupboard to lie forgotten for twelve months. There was nothing else for it. I went to the door and offered the somewhat sticky bag of out-of-date treats to the outstretched hands facing me. Their faces clearly displayed uncertainty as they drew their hands out of the bag and realised their fingers had been stuck together by the sugary residue that had oozed out of the packets.

The same thing happened for each of the subsequent knocks that followed – by the end of the evening, we had encountered somewhere in the region of twenty disappointed kids mumbling an uncertain thank you as they scraped the sweets off their hands and into their sacks.

2009 had thrust me into situation that I did not care to repeat, so this year, I was ready. I bought three assorted bags of The Best Sweets – an assortment of chews, and lollipops and boiled confectionery. At 4.30, I opened the bag and emptied them all into a carrier, a delight to behold that even made my 29 year old eyes bulge with happiness.

It got dark, and we awaited the onslaught that we were sure would happen based on the painful experience of 2009. At half past five, there was the first knock. I leapt up from my seat, grabbed the carrier of joy, and opened the door.

There was the cutest little skeleton standing there, who let out a barely audible but completely adorable ‘twick or tweet’ in response to my appearance. I held the bag out to him and invited him to take a few, which he did with eager enthusiasm. This year, the ‘thank you’ was genuine. Halloween 2010 had arrived and it had started out great.

I closed the door with a grin on my face and sat back down again, the sweet bag near to hand so it was ready to be proffered to the next batch of trick or treaters requesting their haul of goodies. Half an hour passed, and there was nothing. Another hour, and there had not been a single knock on the door. 

By the time it got to 8 o’clock, I faced the awful truth – there would be no more Halloween visitors to our house. Had we been blacklisted by the trick or treating community as a result of our 2009 blunder?

Whether or not this has any truth in it, what has become clear is that once again we have failed in calculating our neighbourhood’s attitude towards Halloween – whether it is over planning, or under planning we have consistently proven ourselves unable to gauge whether or not it will be a busy year.

So I guess the lesson we have learned from Halloween 2010 is that it is always better to buy lots of sweets. That way, the best case scenario and the worst case scenario are perfectly balanced – either the kids get to gorge themselves on The Best Sweets and we don’t get embarrassed, or we get to gorge ourselves on The Best Sweets and we don’t get embarrassed. Everybody is happy.

Actually scratch that – the best case scenario is always going to involve us eating an abundance of sweets. So I’m considering taking a unique strategy for 2011 – we shall buy lots of sweets, then we shall go out for the evening.

I think I have found my perfect Halloween character.