Celia Walden on human winter warmers;

Why are all my girlfriends ‘cuffed’ to men for the winter months? Illustration by Laura Laine

Why so glum?’ my husband asks as I scroll through the list of contacts on my phone in search of a playmate. ‘Christy can’t do tonight. Neither can Mia. They’re both attached these days.’ ‘Deanna?’ he suggests, drawing out the name into a derisive nasal whine. ‘Her new man is taking her to a velvet art gallery downtown. But what can you do?’ I shrug. ‘It’s cufng season.’ ‘I’m sorry, what?’ ‘Velveteria – it’s like the National Portrait Gallery, only every painting has been produced in velvet. Apparently they’ve got a velvet Mona Lisa, Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy – and for some reason a velveteen portrait of Caitlyn Jenner.’ ‘We’ll get to the velvet place,’ he says, sighing. ‘I mean the other thing.’ ‘Cufng season? That’s the fourmonth annual period when you lose all your friends to coupledom,’ I explain. It is called this not because of any sadomasochistic proclivities, but because when – during those arduous winter months – Californian temperatures plummet to 20C, single men and women have no choice but to ‘cuf ’ themselves to the nearest member of the opposite sex in an attempt to preserve body heat.

Of course, when I put it like that, it sounds absurd. And there is, in LA, always the faintest possibility that it may just be absurd. But something in the way these people – with their honeyed, lilting voices – set out their fads and fashions puts you in a gullible stupor only a fellow Brit can break. ‘What a load of premiumquality guf,’ is my husband’s response. And while it is probably a fair summary of this town, its inhabitants and its phenomena, I feel that ‘cufng’ is perhaps being written of too soon here. After all, we Brits have been doing it for decades. We may not be familiar with American rapper Fabolous’s track Cufn Season (‘Summer hoes turning into winter wifeys’) or, like Angelenos, wait until Starbucks starts advertising its ‘winter warmers’ to get the nearest male/ female in a headlock and wrestle them to the ground (a more honest portrayal of the British mating ritual than anything Richard Curtis has ofered up to global audiences). And it’s true that ‘cufng’ for us may be less a case of ‘until spring do us part’ than ‘until tomorrow’s frst Tube do us part’ or ‘until the sauvignon runs out’. But thanks to consistently bleak temperatures, British singletons will cuf anything and everything with a pulse all year long. Hell, we’ll happily cuf the nearest pint of Carling if it gives us the eye – and make that our blizzard buddy.

Not so in LA, where my strong, independent, sass-spewing girlfriends (who relish being single for eight months of the year) suddenly start making vegan meat loaf for men they’ve only just met and embarking on romantic expeditions to velvet art galleries at the frst sign of a Fair Isle jumper. Because like a mini marriage, or living in a Hallmark-movie romantic montage, every domestic pleasure must be crammed into these four months. And who knows? Maybe this Love in a Cold Climate is made all the sweeter by the certainty that come March 1 they can dispense with the seasonal boyfriend, jacket and socks and be the carefree singleton they once were. But for those of us manacled for life, cufng season can be a long, lonely and frustrating afair. Because baby, it’s not even cold outside.

When Californian temperatures plummet to 20C, single people have no choice but to ‘cuf ’ themselves to the nearest member of the opposite sex to preserve body heat