December 2014

Part 1

I’ve travelled back north, to the land of my ancestors. Here, winter has come with a vengeance*. As you rise in the morning, the darkness is Absolut: 100% proof and able to knock you out. Dawn has evidently chosen to have a sleep-in. The quicksilver in my mother’s thermometer has shrunk back to a decidedly frosty -18 Celsius. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the landscape is transformed, snow crystals rendering every surface diamond, like an enormous treasure trove, every encrusted tree sparkling, every pale golden clump of grass glittering in the hesitant morning sun.

There are no Northern lights in the sky, but Northern light is quite singular in its own right. The sun barely makes it above the horizon before it’s gone again, but it makes up for the brevity of its presence with a light show of spectacular proportions; the palette runs from apricot orange in the morning, through pinkish hues of every nuance, to a purple haze before dusk that would have made Jimi Hendrix give up drugs and take up ice skating instead.

Ah, ice skating. It’s one of those inventions that can barely be improved upon. Vikings skated these forest lakes on ice skates made out of moose antlers 1,000 years ago, and there is every likelihood that the Bronze Age people buried in the pine-clad premonitory on the water’s edge did the same 4,000 years before them. How miraculous it must have been for them to walk on water – as indeed it still is for us today.

The ease with which you can traverse a frozen lake, its surface like a ballroom floor, is unlike any other means of self-propulsion I know of; the speed, the silence – broken only by the deep singing of the ice itself – the sensation of going where no man has gone before, however fictitious – it all comes together to create an experience at once exhilarating and meditative.

In spite of the unforgiving cold we keep at it for hours out of sheer joy, reaching parts of the lake it would take ages to get to in summer. Finally, hoar frost in my beard, be-icicled eye brows, buttocks burning and wobbly-ankle’d I struggle back indoors, thence to thaw in front of a roaring fire**. By four in the afternoon the Stygian darkness outside is total once more, and hibernation seems the only option, at least until tomorrow, when we will begin anew…

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* George RR Martin would feel at home, even if white walkers haven’t been sighted… yet.

**Generations come and go, kingdoms and civilisations pass into oblivion, but this is a scene that has remained virtually unchanged down the millennia. It is a comforting thought, somehow.

Part 2

I wrote previously of the tremendous, primeval joy of ice skating, but these last two days we have indulged in even more ancient pastimes. The children and I have engaged in wintery traditions older still than that most time-honoured ritual of enticing the sun to return (the original rationale behind Yule), namely snowman building and snowball fighting.

Anyone who has studied philosophy (Calvin and Hobbes, to be precise) knows that deeply satisfactory feeling that comes from making effigies to appease the snow demons – surely something humans have done since opposable thumbs first encountered snow?

As for snowball fights, there is no archeological evidence (for rather obvious reasons), but it’s impossible to imagine that those first humans who came here to live in the shadow of the inland glacier did not enjoy a good snowball fight. Why else come here, after all?!

The one activity that has them all beaten in terms of its unchanged connection to the past is running through a frozen forest. There is something peculiarly primordial about entering that darkness in midwinter on foot, running in absolute stillness through the trees; permafrost provides a hard easel upon which is stretched an infinite canvas of white snow, where innumerable tracks show just how full of life the wilderness is – from the smallest mice, rabbits and hares via foxes, roe deer and badgers to the red deer and majestic moose, every one of those tracks (but the wild boar) is an open invitation to leave the invisible path and enter the snow-clad sentinel pine on a hunt – with so many mammals, and me the only MAMIL* for leagues around, it’s easy to channel that inner cave man.

Palaeolithic lifestyle be danged, though. After an hour or so outside I’m convinced that there is nothing better than a hot shower, a glass of red wine and some cheese, and I’m not likely to cave in any time soon.

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*Middle-Aged Man In Lycra.