Stop whining: winter’s good for you

It’s called winter: you may have heard of it. Happens annually, they say. Yet each year, fully informed, people still respond with the sort of astonishment displayed by an especially dim budgie when the covers go on.

Long discussions are held on the sheer novelty of nights that “draw in”. The absence of “balmy” seems to bewilder millions. TV hands out dire warnings that there might be “weather” about. And the loss of hours subtracted from one end of the year to compensate for shortfalls at the other – I think that covers the astrophysics – is taken very personally indeed.

I can’t understand it myself. Winter gives me a warm glow, sleet and the North Sea’s attempts to reach Ayrshire permitting. This is the season when the world sods off. This is when I get to play with matches and start fires. Only now do I get to tell my wife that there’s nothing like a bracing winter walk with the dog – factually correct, I’m told – and assure her that of course she doesn’t look like a duvet tied in the middle.

This is a minority view, of course, especially the part about the duvet. Some people so hate the dark days they talk as though they have been victimised by their personal weather god. Everything and everyone is “miserable”. Physical and mental health problems are adduced, from colds to depression, and industry reports an increase in absenteeism as downtrodden workers succumb to virulent sniffle-pox.

Meanwhile, English folk begin to panic en masse over the little-known phenomenon of rain turning into half a centimetre of dirty snow. Those who can evade BA go abroad for a holiday. Some – who “just can’t stand it any more” – even emigrate.

That last fact counts, by any small island group’s standards, as a bad review. There is no denying it. When people are prepared to give up home, family and friends just because the weather is a bit gloomy, they have probably formed an unshakeable opinion. Some refugees flee war, or famine, or vile oppression. In this country there are those who will risk all for the right to wear unsuitable shorts with their Santa hats.

Which brings us to Australia. One fine old tradition of this season is the annual report on Christmas down under. The assumption is that we will all feel envious when an expat with skin like lino boasts of eating turkey nuggets on the beach while the baby sizzles gently, giant spiders make off with the cat, and a bush fire blazes merrily on the quivering horizon.

“It’s paradise,” they cry, never realising how hellish it all sounds. Imagine it: sunshine unceasing, relentless sunshine with everything, and the only clue to the changing of the seasons is when Santa falls off his water skis. This is Groundhog Day for sweaty people.

Seriously, God love the Australians, but there is something endlessly disconcerting about the idea of Christmas in high summer. It can’t be helped, I know, but personally I would be inclined not to bother. I like my seasons in their proper order, and I like my winters wintry. Ice, frost, snow, darkness and the urge to behave like those 19th-century French peasants who hibernated, to all intents and purposes, when the hovel became a little chilly: this is the natural order.

All of this is easy for me to say, of course. I don’t have to worry about staying warm except when Duvet Woman, who shows no sympathy, has to open a door to get back into the house. I don’t work outside. I can manage the heating bills. No-one asks me to clear snow – not more than a dozen times a morning, at any rate – and no-one is depending on me to keep the country running. But winter, the encroaching darkness and the low sun, the trees stripped bare and the winds unstoppable, is fundamental. It’s comforting, almost.

We make a mistake, I think, when we try to abolish the seasons entirely. Clearly, a genetic inheritance formed largely from people who dodged around bogs and crags tells me that there is such a thing as too much nature in the raw. The old rituals and festivals designed to drive winter away and celebrate its departure arose for a reason: good riddance. But if such is the case, the attempt to armour ourselves continually against nature is equally excessive: it makes any winter festival redundant, for one thing.

Bizarre as it sounds, the farce in Copenhagen, the predictable failure of the climate change conference to take real collective ­responsibility for environmental degradation, is symbolic of the self-same willed amnesia where nature is concerned. We embrace the world when it is benign and the summer sun is out, but reject other realities. And when we attempt to deny the world around us in that way, when the old relationships with nature fail, abuse begins.

To enjoy winter you must first respect it, and accept it for what it is. Complaining because December is not July is not a good start. Grumbling because the evening sky does not operate like a backlit LCD screen to help you with the sat-nav in the air-conditioned car while you drive to purchase airlifted exotic fruit and a modish black Christmas tree-like object is to miss the point, somewhat. When we bend the world to all our demands we risk real damage, not least to ourselves.

I don’t mean – for who would I be kidding? – that the dark days should be an endurance course. As a full-time hypocrite and part-time amateur meteorologist, I tend to be the first to ask where that draught is coming from. It strikes me, nevertheless, that the world is best enjoyed when you cease to attempt absolute mastery over every possibility. Bleak is fine, sometimes; wild is good; and early darkness covers a multitude of man’s lapses. For north Europeans, in fact, the deep midwinter is part and parcel of our identity.

Besides, Dylan Thomas did not write A Child’s Christmas On the Costa del Sol. Dickens never got around to A Christmas Beach Bar Karaoke Carol. Winter is part of the culture, deeper by far than all those airbrushed “Xmas” ads. It has a mythic quality, sometimes fearsome, sometimes reassuring. The darkness carries the memory of shadows moving in the firelight in the cave.

Small wonder then that Christianity’s grip on the winter festivals has always been tenuous. That religion attempted to attach itself to something older and stronger and now grumbles, annually, because we fail to enter the spirit of its manufactured tale. But then, the Bible never does explain the details. If God made the world in a week, were those long summer working days, or brief afternoons in winter when it was freezing outside? Makes all the difference, you know.

If you happen to hate winter, meanwhile, think again. If not, console yourself with the thought that Monday will be over before you know it, which may be the best thing you can say about Monday. For now, this particular household resumes its seasonal parlour games with the traditional argument over whether the stuff battering the window is currently sleet or snow.

I say she can let me know when she makes it back from the shops, if she makes it back. “The trick is to lean into the wind,” I say. Sometimes the woman in the duvet has no sense of humour.