Being snowed-in

It took three hours for cabin fever to set in. Last Christmas, snowed in at the Oxfordshire homestead, my brother Ed and I, cooped up, cross, snappish, reverted to childhood squabbling. There’s a photo on my phone of Ed’s dog Rags standing at the kitchen door looking mournfully through the glass. We did let her out, but there are few sights so pitiable as a Chihuahua–Pomeranian trying to gambol, shivering, through four inches of snow. The first afternoon, I paced the upstairs corridor wondering how long before I went full Jack Torrance in The Shining. ‘All snow and no walk makes Laura a dull girl…’

By the third day, I was over the hump and well into hygge. Sheepskin socks, cashmere bobble hat, collected works of Somerset Maugham. I could have been shovelling my way to the main road and gritted freedom. Instead: total snow surrender. That’s the way to do it. Think of Greymuzzle in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, curled around her blind cub in the reeds, keeping him warm while the blizzard rages. When the snow starts to settle: go Greymuzzle.

Christmas is one thing. By the time the Beast from the East came in February and my dad had dug the car out of the drive for the fifth time, awe and wonder had rather worn off. But those days between Christmas and the New Year, when time, trains, traffic and even Twitter seemed to stop, were magic.

Bitter disappointment on the 30th, as the ponds started to fill with melt water. I’d been counting on a snowed-in New Year’s Eve and an excuse not to go to Norfolk for a party at a rectory described to me by one veteran guest as ‘the coldest house in the world’.