The leaves on the oak tree in the park are three-quarters brown and bring to mind the two-tone hair of a model in the ‘before’ picture of a dye advert. The tiny leaves on the apple tree over the garden wall look as though they have been individually removed and stuck in an air fryer to crisp up nicely before being painstakingly reattached. The sky is leaden, the colour of Sunday afternoons on the box in the 1970s, when the grey screen swarmed with Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Spits…
It can only mean one thing. Winter is coming. And just in the nick of time. Because winter is wonderful – easily the best season, no matter what others may claim.
How so? Well, it is the perfect excuse for open fires and for knitwear – and nothing hides that beach-perfect body like an Aran sweater or a herringbone tweed overcoat. It’s the perfect time for walks in the woods or across fields, mud and rotting leaves underfoot, in the rain, drizzle or sleet, with wellies struggling for purchase. It’s the perfect time for bracing strides along the beach that leave you gasping for a mug of strong tea and a slice of shortbread, or better still a pint of bitter in a pub by a roaring fire.
And the most brilliant thing of all? This goes on for months and months. It might officially begin in December and end in March, but the winter we know and love really begins now and lasts till April. This is wonderful, because it means months of Sunday roasts, served up with lashings of Strictly until Christmas, Ski Sunday after. It means the chopping of logs, the warming of wellingtons, the smell of damp dogs, mud clinging to boots. It is, in short, the time of year that gets you closer to the lost world of fingerless gloves, of Fielding, Dickens and Austen.
At the heart of it is the recognition that Britain is a winter nation, because grey skies and the damp nipping cold are the resting bitch-face of our climate. They are what we get when the weather isn’t pretending to be nice. That means we are a people schooled essentially by winter. We might not do snow-chains or snow tyres – God forbid we’d be that prepared – but we are nonetheless wintry people, folk given to tight smiles to keep out the cold and wrapping up warm, even indoors.
And that’s why we can’t get enough of it. It’s part of the reason why Captain Scott went to the South Pole. It’s why we invented competitive skiing. It’s how we dreamed up beef wellington, the Inverness overcoat and the deerstalker. It’s why we invented the novel, because what else can you do to keep yourself going through long winter nights when television hasn’t been invented and your family cheats at cards?
It might officially begin in December and end in March, but the winter we know and love really begins now and lasts till April
Yes, we are a nation birthed beneath the gunmetal skies of November, December and January – as surely as Australia, for instance, is a country born of sunshine and a swath of fauna dedicated to killing you. And thank goodness, because winter is the season that feeds Britain’s phlegmatic soul; it gives us our grit and the kind of comedy we most excel in – gallows humour. What other option is there – particularly if you’re a Georgian or Victorian and central heating is still 100 years away, and it’s April and you’ve scarcely been warm since September? In circumstances like that all you can do is laugh, so is it any coincidence that laughing turns out to be our national pastime – whether it’s at the government, or other people’s governments, or the weather, or each other? Without winter we might not have satire, Billy Connolly or the Perrier Award, or whatever it’s called now.
So we have rather a lot to be grateful to winter for, and not just for filling up the reservoirs and killing off a few mosquitoes. The roasted forerib of beef, heaped with delicious marbled fat like the periwig of a courtier to Louis XIV, would never taste so good if we didn’t have February. Sherry wouldn’t illuminate the palate quite as it does without the frost.
The problem is that like many of the best things in life, winter is the victim of its own success. It goes on too long, probably a good fortnight longer than would be ideal. And yet at the same time, it makes summer worth having by giving us spring to look forward to – otherwise those blue skies would become just so boring.
So don’t begrudge its onset. Embrace the arrival of November and the cold, dark months ahead. Stock up on horseradish sauce and mustard, get some port and tannin-dry reds in, and throw another log on the fire for Sadiq and his mate Ed. They love open fires, they really do.
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