Eulogy for a Nuisance

This essay was first published in issue 14. of Hinterland magazine.

‘Jack Frost, Son of Blast,

felt ruin coming, and he

began to beg for mercy’

                                    The Kalevala

Not long after I turned eighteen, I did what many middle-class Brits of my generation have done and jumbo-jetted to New Zealand to spend a year working and travelling. Being so young, my options for employment were limited. My CV, such as it was, listed thirty months part-time at Burger King (the savings from which had paid my passage), several years as a paperboy, and nothing else. The exotic jobs some travellers enjoyed – raft guide, bungee instructor, etcetera – were far beyond my qualifications. Even those less enviable jobs with which the young get by – barperson, waiter and the like – were, I soon learned, not offered readily to teenage backpackers. And so I found myself compelled into less commonplace work. I cleaned unpaid in exchange for dormitory beds, busked on the streets and, for several months in the rich lands on the North Island’s Pacific coast, picked a variety of fruit.

Nowadays, one episode from this period often comes to my mind. Winter was settling into the land, creeping from the Antarctic circle, up through the long thin nation and out across the hemisphere. I remember watching the battered minibus on which we commuted bouncing away along the ruts of a narrow dirt track, leaving the orchard behind it in a dense dawn silence. The heavy morning air, rich and thick, oozing like ice-cold vodka, muffled the landscape. Each sterile breath rattled into the body, raking the windpipe and stinging the lungs. Soon, the tractor would arrive with our equipment and once we began picking, clambering up and down a twelve-foot ladder with forty kilograms of apples strapped to our chests, we would quickly warm up. Until then, there was nothing to do but stand and shiver. I huddled down into my jacket, pulled my collar up and my arms around me, and resigned myself.

Dennis, my colleague, did not. Looking off somewhere behind my shoulder, his pale, boyish face glowed with wonder. Behind his wire-frame glasses, below his comically oversized ushanka, his eyes widened, and with a reverential Wow! he moved off to inspect something.

I turned to follow him, anticipating something incredible, but just two metres away, in the deep shade beside a fence, Dennis crouched down and began feeling the grass. The blades, usually flush and verdant green, that day had turned a granular white. Their flanks glittered like sugar; their tips bristled beneath his hand. The top of fenceposts, the edges of muddy puddles, even the fruit we would soon pick, all shone brilliantly in the apathetic sun. A frost had settled. Dennis, from tropical Hong Kong, had never seen such a phenomenon before. In amazement, his gloved hands moved across the sub-zero surfaces. From some hidden pocket he pulled a tiny digital camera and began taking photographs.

Thoroughly underwhelmed, I turned away from him, back towards the track, retreating deeper into my clothing and searching the landscape keenly for the tractor. I did not care about the frost, because I had seen it all too often before. On early morning, mid-noughties paper rounds, laden with Sunday specials, I had slipped on pavements slick with ice and bruised arse and elbow. On edgeland rugby fields, squeezed between motorways and railways, I had been mildly concussed on soil as hard as stone. On the streets of Ormskirk, I had watched my dad shake Christmas drunks awake, warning of the rigidity creeping upon them.

For Brits in winter, frosts were a quotidian standard. In those darkest months on the border between two years, it was expected that morning would reveal a world turned a cruel, pale white. A white that crept from every corner, across every surface. As the sun began its lazy crawl along the roof-slate horizon, the earth and all its objects – pavements and puddles, litter and leaves – would glitter and crunch like smashed car-glass. Bodies of water shrank from their edges, replaced by paper-thin ice. With care, Coca-Cola could be chilled to perfection outside the back door; without care, milk might turn to slush at the front.

Snow has long been romanticised by the British public, in large part due to Charles Dickens’ anomalous childhood. Dickens grew up through the coldest decade the country had experienced for centuries, witnessing eight consecutive white Christmases. That snowbound image of our winter holiday was then written into our national myth via his hugely popular stories. A phenomenon that is uncommon for much of the island became part of British identity. Ever since, snowfall in Britain has engendered a nostalgia for an idealised, imagined past. A teasing frequency helps sustain the allure. Snow has always fallen enough to be familiar but little enough to be exotic; often enough that even our youngest have memories of it and that we all know the appropriate games, but little enough that those memories are cherished as rarities. Snowfall in Britain is an event, when most of the country will allow itself time off, even just an hour or two, to throw missiles and build effigies and revert to childhood. Snow has for a long time been reason to stop and pause, to play and to photograph.

Frost was very much not. Where snow was a rare and exciting specimen, frost was a tedious burden, a dislikeable relative who arrived like clockwork every year and reliably outstayed a short welcome. Where snow was a possibility, falling most winters but not all, and quite rarely in earnest, frost was a certainty. Waking up on sharp mornings, I would roll over and return to sleep; feign illness; hope that rugby pitch would be too hard, that practice would be cancelled on grounds of unsafe grounds. I would try to stay inside as long as possible. Frost brought slips and falls, numb digits, dangerous roads, burst pipes. It was not a source of wonder. It was a nuisance.

It is only a decade since I turned impatiently away as Dennis gazed in awe. Only ten winters. But over those years, a norm has shifted. Frosts in Britain ceased to be regular, becoming occasional, then infrequent, then rare. Winter now often brings a couple at most; some years, there are none. The Overton window of British weather has moved, and as the view on one side has revealed a new palette of parched chartreuse and dusty brown, at the other fierce whites and marbled blues have been pushed to the very margin, almost out of sight. My experience, I admit, is urban. I live in cities and suburbs and always have. I am sure that those who live in the countryside, up hills, or further north, remain more familiar with temperatures either side of freezing. But so was I, once. My experience is urban, but the trend, I am sure, is not.

Over the past ten years, frosts have become what snows once were: infrequent and welcome guests. Now when they come, they are weak and fleeting. They do not reach deep into the topsoil but sit lightly on the tips of the grass. When dawn comes, they capitulate pathetically. While they linger, they are remarkable in the most literal sense. Look, there’s a frost! Did you see the frost this morning? On clear winter days I rise early in hope of seeing one before it melts away. More often than not, I am disappointed, finding the world in its familiar sodden state: damp and pathetic – cold, but not bitter.

Not always, of course. I doubt frosts will disappear altogether for a long time to come. Snows have not, but they have changed. Where once snowfall would build irresistibly as temperatures trended downwards and winter backed up upon itself, now they burst unpredictably from storms that we call freakish but are really first-name familiar. They stick only for a day or two, if at all, until “unseasonably” mild air erodes them. Frosts likewise will persist on occasion, when the air yields to clear skies and temperatures begrudgingly drop down close to zero, but only as a thin substitute of their former selves. They will not settle into the land for days and weeks at a time.

What is altogether lost is the nuisance. Now that frosts are not regular, they are not resented. No longer do I roll over in bed, skip the morning walk, wish it were otherwise. Paperboys are now rarely seen walking the streets, but they could do so in relative safety. I cannot recall the last time I slipped on ice; I do not remember the last time I saw ice extensive enough to slip upon. If ever I have to clear a windscreen, I am strangely grateful. Grateful for a reminder of an environment that is disappearing. Grateful that although a process has begun, although it is likely unstoppable in both absolute and pragmatic terms, it is not yet complete. Grateful that for now, for a while, I am still occasionally afforded a reminder of what once was, before it is gone forever.

Last year, just one winter ago, I drove with friends to North Wales in early December. On serpentine A-roads in the heights of Snowdonia, headlights cut through the low night and reflected back from the kerbs and gutters in innumerable crystalline shards. A frost deeper than any I had seen for years sat heavy upon the land. A frost that was not soft or fleeting but robust, that held the grass from tip to root, that spread uninterrupted away into the darkness. Passing a lone streetlight, a tungsten wave illuminated the car and just for a moment I caught a reflection of myself in the thin glass of the window. On my face I fancied I could see that same look of awe that I had seen on Dennis’s years earlier. I suggested we stop, to feel the thick air and the sharp grass and the hard soil. We considered it but decided that we needn’t bother. There would, we decided, be more when we arrived in Barmouth, on the hills and dales along the coast. We drove on, saying we would surely see a lot more over the next few days. We didn’t, and I haven’t seen a hard frost since.

Postscript

This essay was first written in late December 2020. Shortly afterwards, that season brought some of the most sustained cold weather I have experienced for years. For the first time in a long time, temperatures straddled freezing for more than a fortnight; I saw more frosts in one month than in the two previous winters combined. The pleasure I could take in them was, however, limited – by cruel coincidence, England’s first severe winter for almost a decade arrived the same year as a pandemic of an acute respiratory illness. I have seen more frosts since then, but they are becoming ever more erratic and unpredictable. Last winter, I found myself driving home from Stansted airport through thick fog in minus fifteen degrees centigrade – a freakishly low temperature for middle England even in Charles Dickens’ time. As I revise this piece, in July 2023, temperature records are being broken all over the world, and this month looks almost certain to be the hottest that humankind has ever recorded. Jack Frost, I fear, will find no mercy any time soon.

References

Lönnrot, E. (1989) The Kalavala: An Epic Poem After Oral Tradition, trans. K. Bosley, OUP, Oxford