W
INTER arrived in our house on Saturday with all the force of an arctic blast.
For the record it has never been this cold before. My numb, wind chill bitten fingers have barely been able to type a correct word all day due to this infernal cold! Imagine how real workers working outside are feeling! Hell has well and truly frozen over as the hawks get ready to gather in the corridors of the White House, having been hired by the former Apprentice judge. With pre-Black Friday (Red November sales) beckoning in seductive and shouty tones on radio and television ads, we duly ended up in local electrical goods shops and bought a new telly in the most momentous buy of recent years, as far as the Whirlwind Princess and The Little Fella were concerned, on Saturday.
They slalomed around the stores, from Ultra High Definition tv set to tv set, cherubic faces lit up in frozen wonderment at the eye-catching images flashing in front of them. We settled on a nice, well reduced set, nothing grand but the kids were over the moon. The two of them get their way a bit too much, especially around me but then their demands, ultimately, are not that great, even if they try the life out of you sometimes. So we were about to leave as The Man in Red was arriving in our hometown when we discovered to our horror that the car wouldn’t start and simultaneously that an accident had occurred in the back seat. Within a minute of asking for jump cables at the counter of the shop, two complete strangers had offered to help out. Luckily the car started when I turned the ignition and all was fine.
Back to the snow. Sunday snow fell all around our house, inside it that is, as the kids got the styrofoam from the box and gleefully crumpled it into thousands of pieces all over the newly hoovered downstairs.
As always initial shock and horror gave way to parental understanding, only for that feeling of shock and horror to return. Being a softie at heart when it comes to the kids, (I’m an arrogant p**** at work apparently, according to one reader who didn’t appreciate my ‘ liberal’ column last week), I cave in far too much to my kids’ demands. Anyone with a heart had it chilled last week by the story of the 14-year-old British girl who chose to be frozen last week following her impending death from cancer. ‘JS’ fought for the right to be frozen after her death through the courts, saying her mother should have the final say, even if her father was against the idea. Today her body is stored upside down, strapped to a wooden plank, wrapped in a sheet and nylon sleeping bag. She is inside a 10ft high white fibre-glass vat of liquid nitrogen and alongside her in the tank are five other bodies. The horrific mental image is something akin to what you would expect in a horror movie around this time of the year but for her heartbroken parents, this is reality - a reality which they will have to live with for the rest of their days. The girl was cryogenically frozen in America in the hope that she can be ‘woken up’ and cured in the future after winning a landmark court case in her final days. In a letter to the court she said: ‘I don’t want to die but I know I am going to...I want to live longer...I want to have this chance.’
JS asked Mr Justice Peter Jackson to rule that her mother, who supported her desire to be cryogenically preserved, should be the only person allowed to make decisions about the disposal of her body. Shortly before her death in a London hospital on October 17, the judge granted JS her wish.