Winter: a pit pony’s diary
England officially welcomed winter on December first, a somewhat tardy gesture as this most infamous of English seasons had been touring the country for months under the guise of autumn. Now that it was officially cold, locals could stop pretending it wasn’t and get on with saying it was. Which they were apt to do at the slightest invitation or usually without one.
I had looked forward to this notorious three month spell since arrival. Eight years I’d endured in Brisbane. Eight long seasonless years of sunshine and steamy heat. There were seasons, at least on the calendar anyway. But I for one couldn’t tell summer, autumn and spring apart. They looked the same, wore the same clothes, spoke the same shrill language of cicadas; a wall of white noise – nature’s sizzling, searing, ear piercing soundtrack to the heat. Sunshine gets boring and I longed for rain. When it came (which tended to be in a flustered, tardy rush), I’d find a sheltered spot outside, sit and marvel at it like it was a fireworks display.
I was all for seasons – all four of them. The changing of the seasons gave you a sense of the passing of time – a tri-monthly wake-up call. In Brisbane I could go nine months before I realised I’d been treading water. Here, with regular seasonal reminders that time was slipping by, I knew I was treading water. Actually, I was drowning.
I also quickly discovered that eight years in Brisbane had been the worst possible preparation for an English winter…
***
I’d thought Gabriel was just winding me up when she threw two police baton-sized cans of windscreen de-icer in a Tesco trolley. Then I woke to my first Volvo-shaped igloo…
Through November and December weekend trips to the Cragmoor Grocers, Sweet Merchants, Post Office and Tea Rooms became exercises in patient demisting and chattering teeth, exercises I generally failed, instead becoming quite competent at driving through a porthole, with chattering teeth.
Days didn’t so much shorten as become nondescript grey areas in the black. The landscape lost all its definition; edges blurred; hills, trees, drystone walls, buildings all became indistinct, as if viewed through frosted glass. Hartley Castle House and the castle ruins adopted an ominous hue. The sky just disappeared into a creamy mushroom soup miasma. Everything got damp and stayed damp. Puddles on potholed roads iced over, occasionally thawed, but never went away. All but the least attractive birds flew south. All but the woolliest animals went indoors. Grit trucks became another slow obstacle to get stuck behind. The Hustwickgate High Street became a treacherous, thirty degree ice rink full of foolhardy shoppers, all rugged up like Russian peasants, all drawn, pallid and tousled like they’d just seen a ghost on a most unpleasant log flume ride. Winter in the north of England was more drab and awful than I’d ever imagined. So utterly, colour sappingly, mind and extremity numbingly bitter, bleak and depressing. I felt like a pit pony trapped on the set of a Bella Lugosi movie, stumbling about the dark, dank, misty moors with the werewolves and lurching others.
I was in Heaven. And, of course, hell.
Any news of Chicken Colditz and its conscientious objectors was now provided exclusively by the dailies and the longer nothing exciting happened, the more that news got buried beneath a plethora of proper terrorism, philandering politicians and football. When the saga of Skipton-le-Beans did qualify for a few token column centimetres all it ever amounted to was media speculation as to the activists’ next move (if any) and media dramatisation of ‘an apprehensive community on tender hooks’. The spokesperson for Chicken Colditz, one Mariabella Hogg, had clearly been given legal counsel to avoid specifics, speaking of me only as ‘a certain suspect’ in bitter, woe betide sound bites of a simple, country family under siege.
Occasional drive-bys revealed that all but the hardiest of chicken fanciers had lost interest. The police presence was down to a single road cone lodged nose first in a hedge. The only indications as to the once intense media interest were indentations; deep, many and varied ruts in the grass verges.
Clearly everyone was now sitting back waiting for something to happen, resources better served elsewhere. There was only so long Her Majesty was going to tolerate her finest officers flouncing about outside a wall while parking infringements were going unpenalised. And there was only so long a young, ambitious journalist could stare at that very same wall before realising this wasn’t going to be his ‘Berlin’.
It was safe to assume the Terror Team were still analysing letters, stamps and envelopes from all angles over copious quantities of instant coffee in plastic cups somewhere in London. Security-wise however, the financial onus had been thrust back on the small round shoulders of Austin Hogg. Mid-December, a burly and rather forlorn skinhead guard in black trousers and black jacket was stationed at the gates to Chicken Colditz sucking up our inheritance in great dollops of ten pound an hour indifference.
The onset of winter also brought with it an indescribably awful day when Ping Ping and Yang Yang suddenly disappeared from their field. I came down as per usual in pre-dawn darkness (anytime up to nine o’clock), shone my torch into the middle of the field, shone it into the four corners of the field, jumped the gate and shone it into the blind bit around the corner…
Not to put too fine a point on it, I did not greet this discovery in a calm and dignified manner, my farm-wide search for Dave Land less grown man demanding to know the whereabouts of his stock, more wailing lost boy looking for his mummy at a county fair. It was just as well it was dark. It was just as well I was in a hooded coat. It was just as well I didn’t find Dave Land for nearly an hour…
Because yes, it was true I had not properly committed to buying Ping Ping and Yang Yang, as committing would have meant handing over the cash and I didn’t have that much disposable cash. And yes, Dave Land and his slatted trailer had got to them first. And yes, as anyone who knows anything about farming in an English winter, he’d merely moved them indoors.
Meanwhile Kurt and Courtney – the two happy souls who had remained loyal to us throughout – were now utterly at home in England. Plainly they preferred the English cold to the Brisbane heat. They were more energetic, rarely flagging on long challenging walks across the moors. We’d found an excellent one: through the main gate behind the castle ruins, down the bank, across the valley, across the footbridge over the stream, across the lane and onto the woodland track on the other side.
There we were officially off Dave Land’s farm and on what had been euphemistically called a ‘Public footpath.’ There was even a little wooden sign saying ‘Public footpath’ pointing in the direction the path went. But this was no public footpath. Not according to my definition. Where I came from public footpaths were things you walked down next to streets. They were made of concrete or tarseal and they had waste bins and shops on them and places to stop for a coffee. Public footpaths weren’t a foot wide and made of thick brown gloop. They didn’t (unless you lived in San Francisco) require the skills of a rock climber to ascend, those of an abseiler to descend. And they generally didn’t contain sopping foliage that slapped you in the face like a bouquet of wet pilchards when your partner forgot you were right behind her. Public meant public. It meant old people, people in wheelchairs, spastics and amputees. I’d like to see the quadriplegic who could negotiate this ‘public footpath’ in a two wheel drive.
That said, I was ecstatic that we, young, fit, not yet lung cancer-ridden specimens had such a wonderful, dog friendly, cross country facility at our back gate. Kurt and Courtney were equally ecstatic as any dogs in their right minds would be.
Courtney was the sporty, up and at em, running, jumping, ball chasing kind of dog, Kurt was more of a sniffer, a potterer, an intellectual. He didn’t see the value in running about aimlessly or hurtling after balls. Such haste did not promote the efficient evaluation of smells. Such haste was for young, gaga dogs like Courtney, who had not yet developed a connoisseur’s appreciation for the fine aromas of flowers, fence posts and six week old sheep shit.
The wedding refused to go away. Gabriel, despite pleas to the contrary, continued to trawl the Internet for outrageously expensive venues in New Zealand and North Yorkshire and run these past me; each and every one of them capable of burying us with one flick of my ailing debit card; each and every one of them perpetuating the now flagrant show of non-existent wealth as our fictitious wedding budget blew out without the slightest effort to reign it in. All I had was the flimsy stay of execution provided by events at Chicken Colditz, but each day the Cold War continued without resolution was one day closer to the day Gabriel insisted we gave Chicken Colditz the cold shoulder and went ahead without paternal consent, effectively cutting us from the will.
***
It snowed twice in December: On the eighteenth the entire country disappeared beneath a dozen hospital-white sheets. There was chaos on the Ms, the As and the Bs, but mostly the Ms and As, a lethal combination of snow, ice and people in cars leading to a spate of skidding accidents and blocked arterials. On the Bs, conditions were no less treacherous, many of the minor back lanes around the moors going ungritted, many of the more isolated residents – including us – snowed in for two days. What an adventure – us against the elements, stuck up there on our hill with nothing but a landline, two mobile phones and email to keep us in touch with the outside world; nothing but Sky television, Little Britain DVDs and my thousand song iPod music collection to keep us entertained. Forced to survive on two hundred quids worth of rations we’d bought at Tesco the day before.
If only it had snowed like that on the twenty fourth I could have experienced my first white Christmas. It did snow on the night of the twenty fourth, but when I pulled back the blinds on Christmas morning, it was a stretch to call it ‘white’. It was more of a ‘whipped cream mail bomb Christmas.’
It was also a somewhat sad, reflective Christmas, celebrated as it was away from both our families for apposite reasons. We communicated with mine via web cam, love and best wishes fired about with gay abandon across twelve time zones. We tried to communicate with Gabriel’s but they weren’t answering the phone. I enjoyed that Christmas Day, just me, Gabriel, Kurt and Courtney, far more than I would have had we spent it at Chicken Colditz amidst all their inherent humbug. But that’s not the point. We were shut out. Ostracised. We weren’t even given the chance to politely refuse an invitation.
Same with New Year. Which we celebrated four times: At 11am for New Zealand. At 1pm for Brisbane. At midnight for England. And at 3am for every backward North Yorkshire farmer. We had company in the form of Jimmy and Fiona Mason, newly weds from Morton-on-Swale who were perfectly nice, steady people utterly superfluous to ensuing events, so I won’t even bother describing them.
And as those who had lost control of their own destinies were want to do, we dismissed the year that was as an aberration and entrusted ourselves into the care of the year to come, blithely handing over the reins to the miracles of January 1st.
Surely things could only improve.
