Winter Is Finally Here

At last the biting cold winds are back. The driving rain, the hale, the 4 hours of daylight we get each day. How I’ve missed them. That’s not to say however that I do not enjoy Summer, I do indeed and this was a particularly good one. But nothing is ever right for us Brits – Summer is too hot and we suffer for lack of air-conditioning. Winter is too cold of course but we are all too tight and stubborn to turn the heating on, and although it never even gets that cold in Scotland, we spend our lives bleating constantly about the weather: British small-talk at its finest.
What I am most excited about isn’t so much the weather itself, rather it’s the being indoors that it forces upon us, and our British culture truly makes the best of it. When December arrives and we are all decaying due to nutrition-poor diets, some wine with a roast is the only thing to get you back up and kicking. Alternatively, putting some weight behind the bar of one of our country’s ubiquitous, stuffy pubs and chatting for a good seven or eight hours can prove quite effective in mitigating the effects of a bleak weather forecast.
Winter is the Withnail and I of seasons — winter is the sixties, seventies, and eighties,when everything was terrible and nothing worked. Yet the sixties had The Beatles, the seventies had Queen, and the eighties had Guns N’ Roses. Summer, on the other hand, is the Sabrina Carpenter of the calendar, tasteless and charmless. Dickens had a point when he wrote A Christmas Carol. We can all be miserable and doleful when we want to be. I am aware of the moral of the story, but I am not saying that we should all strive to live miserly, miserably, and thoroughly alone. I am simply saying that complaining is good fun, and winter offers the perfect excuse for it.
Summer is nothing but a constant deluge of dry and rubbery meat cooked over a grill, of salads and cocktails with silly names made using silly alcohols, and fatuous flavours of ice cream. That is the epitome of a typical (at least English) barbecue. Somehow it always seems that the least capable ends up in control of cooking the meat. To add to the torture of summer is ice cream, the mediocre frozen milk available in a plethora of bland and uninteresting variations. The names and flavours are simply getting out of hand (who the hell wants a Smurf-flavoured ice cream). A cold scoop of processed cream is just something people shouldn’t consume. Rather, opt for a spotted dick — t’s time we take ourselves a little more seriously.
More generally, Summer is not a season for us Brits, we don’t appear under our best light in warm weather. We don’t fare well on beaches: either translucent or disturbingly red, we waddle up and down a beach drinking a lager and smoking a Marlboro Gold, playing beach cricket with an utter lack of dignity. It just isn’t a good image. Instead, I ask all of you to put on your raincoat, your boots, your jumpers, head into a pub for an ale, and get a hold of yourselves. This year, settle into the looming winter with a can of Stella and a grim smile, knowing that you can sit in a kitchen revelling in your misery until Spring.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Kommentarer