Former Fan of Wintry Weather

Winter used to be my favourite season, and yes that sounds perverse coming from someone who is from Finland - a country where everyone moans about the length and breadth of winter, and conversely, praises the sweetness of the short-lived summer.

Not me though, I used to love the winter, always. The darkness I didn't mind, in fact, when evening wrapped its thick dark blanket around the landscape from 3 pm onwards, I felt strangely alive. Alive, I guess, because it made me acutely aware of the changing seasons and all that comes with it. Plus you could go out at 6 pm, lie on your back against the snow and gaze at the starry sky, engulfed in blackness. Blackness that is in fact made up of whiteness, zillions of little glistening snow crystals reflecting light from the stars above. It feels like floating in space - although I've never floated in space, I used to imagine that's what it must be like for the astronauts.

Winter used to be special.

So what happened? For quite a while after moving to England I would still get excited over a bit of snow, or frost even, being reminded of the magic that was winter. Not that we'd get too many days in a year with decent frost in Manchester; the Pennines, the Irish Sea and an urban micro climate make sure that wintry conditions are a rarety in these parts. Even now when the rest of the country, it seems, has had a foot of snow or more, there's hardly any evidence of the white stuff in and around South Manchester.

But my recent turn against wintry weather has nothing to do in fact with snow, the lack thereof, or the reported chaos in those parts of the UK blessed/cursed with a fair dose of it. Although I do feel sorry for all those people stranded at airports and such like, I know what that feels like having been grounded at Copenhagen once for 17 hours due to a blizzard.

It's the fact that I can't get warm in the winter that does it for me. The house I co-own has loft insulation, additional underfloor insulation, double-glazed windows and central heating (goes without saying if you ask me, but let's just say it anyway).

When the weather is cool (that's to say, approximately 8 months of the year in Manchester) I wear woolly socks around the house, layers upon layers of clothes, often a fleece, and when I sit down I have to wrap myself in a blanket like an old squaw.

I am known to have worn all of the above to bed as well, because there's nothing more unpleasant than slipping in between cold sheets if you ask me - the bed feeling like a block of ice underneath you (of course, ironically the opposite is true in the summer, but this is not summer, is it?).

I almost begin to see the point of hot water bottles and electric blankets, but still after 9 years I stand proud (and cold) thinking that I will not be caught with such items. Also, I have a slight phobia of being electrocuted in bed due to some dodgy wiring in the blanket "made in home town" as Xiaolu Guo would put it (for those who haven't had the pleasure of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, it's well worth a read).

As a former fan of wintry weather, I still enjoy the aesthetic improvements that snow brings upon the Manchester streetscape, it makes it very Lowry-esque, methinks.

But let it be known that I am oh-so-sick of being cold.