WHERE IS IT?

The winter? Since late autumn the weather forecasters have been threatening a very hard winter. We have been warned to expect blizzards, gales, and freezing temperatures – just all your weather nightmares. Except it seems their predictions are, as so often, wide of the mark. Maybe they should go back to looking at a piece of seaweed hung in the kitchen. Better, they could tell the rest of us how to get a job where being right seems low on the list of required attributes.

In London we've had a few flakes. Elsewhere there has been an inch here and there, more on the hills and mountains, but seriously, nothing to deter anyone other than a transport manager looking for a bad service excuse.

Britain is an island and thanks to the Gulf Stream we have a temperate climate. The real problems are that we don't have a climate, we have weather and often anywhere from two to four seasons per day. Secondly, it's damp, and cold feels much colder here than elsewhere because of it. I lived in Bishkek for a time, a city with a continental, dry, climate. I swear that minus 12 there feels warmer than minus two in London.

Of course, there have been brutal winters here, 1947 and 1963 stand out. The winter of ‘47 is still fresh in my mind because I helped my father to make a snowball that was bigger than me. It also stands out because of balaclava helmets, potatoes and brown paper. Let me explain.

My parents wasted nothing. There was not much of anything and so frugality was more of a necessity than a character trait. Balaclava helmets resulted from that. During WW2 everyone had black out curtains. They were heavy black curtains that prevented any light showing, light that might have guided an enemy bomber. After the war, people thought of things to do with them. My mother used them to make a seemingly endless supply of helmets. I recall how to make them. Use the base of an iron as a pattern. Trace the pattern with chalk and cut out the pieces sewing them together to form a helmet. Cutting two or three pieces in half made the front opening. After sewing the pieces together, they were turned inside out and a chinstrap added. I hated them. I would rip mine off as soon as I was out of mother retribution range.

I did enjoy baked potatoes. At night, in the winter, my mother would put potatoes in the ash pan under the fire before going to bed. In the morning we got two, one for each pocket, to keep our hands warm. Not that they survived the whole walk to school. I especially loved the charred skin that is supposed to be unhealthy – it tasted wonderful.

It's often windy in Britain and on cold windy days my mother would wrap us in brown paper before we put on a sweater. It stopped the wind and kept one warm although it did rustle a bit!