What’s happened to the frosted trees and copper sunshine of a proper winter?
There is something depressing about a mild winter. I worry for the buds and snowdrops emerging in January, but even more, I worry they know exactly what they are doing. Frosts in the Berkshire countryside have been late this year and gone by lunchtime. Unless something changes soon, the brazen, early growth of trees and flowers will actually be perfectly alright and spring will be over before we know it.
The absence of a true season is unsettling to a psychological clock set by weeks of biting frost and bare branches. In my childhood winters, we had to spend half an hour defrosting our toes after morning outings. What is the point of a roaring fire or a hot water bottle now, when the worst natural hazard of the morning is an unusually big puddle?
I miss the furry, grey coating of frost that lights up with coppery sparkles in the sunshine and the quiet hush of a frozen wood. At the moment, the only sign that there has been any sort of winter are the soggy floods blanketing the water meadows and the ankle-thick mud clogging the bridleways. This is autumn behaviour. Winter calls for a pause, an enforced full stop to the year.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra thought winter was essential for character building. “I begin each day with an act of malice; I mock winter with a cold bath,” he declared. “I am especially malicious in the morning, at that early hour when the pail rattles at the well and the horses neigh warmly down grey lanes.” The dreary grey of warm rainclouds and the squelch of mud on the footpath just doesn’t do the trick.
Last week, I watched at sunset as a group of geese in V-formation circled around and around above a brown field, honking away. At first I wondered what they were doing – then I saw another
V appear from beyond the wood and merge itself, gracefully, into the first. Over the next 10 minutes, seven or eight new groups joined the gathering, until there were dozens of them wheeling around together, gabbling away, strong necks straining forwards amid the beat of a hundred wings.
Then, at some unfathomable signal, they decided it was time to go, and the flock headed towards the horizon. Woe betide the latecomers.