As a news item, the cold weather is seen fundamentally as a crisis of movement. Snow once again blocks a motorway. Flights are canceled and trains to the suburbs delayed. Pedestrians fall down on pavements. Gritters stand by across the country. But coldness itself — the threat that cold poses to human wellbeing? It hardly features.
This may be because the sensation of being cold is hard to convey in pictures, but a more likely explanation to me is that many fewer people are as cold as they were, say, in the winter of 1947, and that coldness for most of us has retreated to the status of a historical memory because keeping warm is now so much easier. Predicting temperatures of minus 20˚C, the TV weatherman looks serious; he may even hunch his shoulders and act out a hammy “brrrr”; but our reaction is mainly a thrill that we should be living through such times.
This isn’t new.
Reflecting on his experience of dragging a sled through an Antarctic winter in 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard mocked the people he’d subsequently met who claimed to have endured similar cold: “Oh, we had minus 50˚C temperatures in Canada; they didn’t worry me.”
And then, Garrard wrote: “You find that they had nice dry clothing, a nice night’s sleep in a nice aired bed, and had just walked out after lunch for a few minutes from a nice warm hut or an overheated train.”
As an experience of cold, he continued, this could only be compared “to eating a vanilla ice with hot chocolate cream after an excellent dinner at Claridge’s.”
Cherry-Garrard’s book, The Worst Journey in the World, must be among the best descriptions of cold ever written. The author was a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s polar expedition, but the “worst journey” in the title doesn’t apply to Scott’s fatal trip. Earlier — together with two men, Wilson and Bowers, who died with Scott — Cherry-Garrard spent five hellish weeks trudging the 225km to and from the breeding grounds of the emperor penguin, to fetch back eggs whose embryos, it was mistakenly thought, might contain evidence of the missing evolutionary link between fish and birds.
They hauled their sled in almost total darkness, through blizzards and up and down crevasses and in temperatures that ranged from minus 40˚C to minus 57˚C. The sweat froze inside their clothes and the breath around their faces. Cherry-Garrard wondered why their tongues never froze — although did they protect them by keeping conversation to a minimum.
As it was, “all my teeth, the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces,” he wrote.
Their skin peeled off or got frost-bitten if it came into the briefest contact with metal. Ice formed over the pages of Wilson’s notebook as soon as he opened it to write. Match after match was struck uselessly to light the primus stove that heated their diet of hot water and pemmican. Cherry-Garrard dreamed of tinned peaches in syrup and welcomed the notion of death.
Other books can send a shiver through the reader. Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, for example, tells us that immiserated German troops were so desperate for gloves that they killed and skinned stray dogs; and that later, when taken prisoner, they would sometimes stand together in a group at night with a blanket over their heads “hoping to sleep like horses ... to keep in some warmth from their breath.”
Cherry-Garrard, however, writes vividly and memorably out of bitter personal experience and it was his book I thought of this week when we returned to a cold house where the central heating had in our absence gone kaput.
I don’t mean that we were absurd in our self-pity; a house in north London isn’t a tent on Mount Erebus and there was no pemmican to be boiled. We settled in one room, lit a fire and made smart dashes to other parts of the house to fetch food and fuel. But the chill was noticeable — it affected our domestic behavior — and over the next two days we were returned to a time of the vest and the cardigan, when flannel and flannelette were indispensable textiles, when bathwater needed to be heated in pans, beds warmed well in advance by hot bottles, and the source of draughts identified and, where possible, stopped with a strip of felt.
In other words, we’d moved away from the luxurious experience of cold as “a vanilla ice with hot chocolate cream” and an inch or two towards Cherry-Garrard’s extreme and prolonged discomfort.
Hunched around our fire, it was easy to remember how this present scene had been a previous normality and how household life was once so much colder.
“I would wake up in the morning and there would be ice on the inside of my bedroom window.”
“I remember the first sound I heard every morning was mum scraping the ashes from the grate.”
“Housewives used to have scorch marks down one side of their legs from sitting too close to the fire — they called it fire tartan.”
“The furniture was arranged differently then — the chairs around the fire and then an awkward gap between them and the sideboard.”
“Dad was a devil with the poker.”
The revolution came, of course, with central heating. In the days when smoke still drifted from every household chimney and coal came to the door in sacks, my Latin teacher taught us the word “hypocaust.”
Roman villas, he said, had a form of central heating concealed beneath their floors — the Romans being so advanced, and in this instance more advanced than we were, because heating systems that used radiators were in the 1950s (so far as we knew) confined to institutions such hospitals and schools that had boiler houses and neat pyramids of coke, supervised by men in clean brown overalls.
And then within 30 years nearly every house was fitted with its miniature variant. Gas and oil replaced coke. Some people claimed to dislike it — it made houses “stuffy” — and placed saucers of water near radiators (as though they were pets) to act as makeshift humidifiers. But there was no stopping central heating’s advance. If the pill changed sexual behavior, then central heating did the same for the family, sending children to nest in warm bedrooms, permitting more frequent baths, redistributing the living room furniture. Entire houses, rather than just one or two rooms inside them, now glowed wastefully with heat.
From this balmy atmosphere, fueled largely by imported gas, we can view the external cold with far greater equanimity and mainly in terms of its disruptive effect on transport or its pathetic consequence for sheep. Unless things go wrong, we don’t feel it, not as we used to do. And if things do go wrong, I recommend you pick up a copy of The Worst Journey in the World, which will make you thank God for even the coldest bedroom. In that sense, it is a very warming book.
There are moments in history when America has turned its back on its principles and withdrawn from past commitments in service of higher goals. For example, US-Soviet Cold War competition compelled America to make a range of deals with unsavory and undemocratic figures across Latin America and Africa in service of geostrategic aims. The United States overlooked mass atrocities against the Bengali population in modern-day Bangladesh in the early 1970s in service of its tilt toward Pakistan, a relationship the Nixon administration deemed critical to its larger aims in developing relations with China. Then, of course, America switched diplomatic recognition
The international women’s soccer match between Taiwan and New Zealand at the Kaohsiung Nanzih Football Stadium, scheduled for Tuesday last week, was canceled at the last minute amid safety concerns over poor field conditions raised by the visiting team. The Football Ferns, as New Zealand’s women’s soccer team are known, had arrived in Taiwan one week earlier to prepare and soon raised their concerns. Efforts were made to improve the field, but the replacement patches of grass could not grow fast enough. The Football Ferns canceled the closed-door training match and then days later, the main event against Team Taiwan. The safety
The National Immigration Agency on Tuesday said it had notified some naturalized citizens from China that they still had to renounce their People’s Republic of China (PRC) citizenship. They must provide proof that they have canceled their household registration in China within three months of the receipt of the notice. If they do not, the agency said it would cancel their household registration in Taiwan. Chinese are required to give up their PRC citizenship and household registration to become Republic of China (ROC) nationals, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said. He was referring to Article 9-1 of the Act
The Chinese government on March 29 sent shock waves through the Tibetan Buddhist community by announcing the untimely death of one of its most revered spiritual figures, Hungkar Dorje Rinpoche. His sudden passing in Vietnam raised widespread suspicion and concern among his followers, who demanded an investigation. International human rights organization Human Rights Watch joined their call and urged a thorough investigation into his death, highlighting the potential involvement of the Chinese government. At just 56 years old, Rinpoche was influential not only as a spiritual leader, but also for his steadfast efforts to preserve and promote Tibetan identity and cultural
RSS