A short article in today’s Guardian contrasts the recent blast of arctic weather with the memorable winter of 1962/3, when the snow arrived on Boxing Day and stayed until mid-March. I remember building an igloo (and if the snow had stayed any longer, I might have needed retrospective planning permission for it). I remember skating - inelegantly - on Lake Windermere with mum, as Arthur Ransome had done, during the Great Frost of 1895, when he was a pupil at Old College in Bowness.
According to this passage from his autobiography, “I had the great good fortune to be at school at Windermere, when for week after week the lake was frozen from end to end. Then indeed we were lucky in our headmaster, who liked skating and wisely decided that as we were not likely to have such an experience again (the lake freezes over only about once in every thirty-five years), we had better make the most of it. Lessons became perfunctory. After breakfast, day after day, provisions were placed on a big toboggan and we ran it down into Bowness when we tallied on to ropes astern of it to hold it back and prevent it from crashing into the hotel at the bottom.
“During those happy weeks we spent the whole day on the ice, leaving the steely lake only at dusk when fires were already burning and torches lit and our elders carried lanterns as they skated and shot about like fireflies. I saw a coach and four drive across the ice, and the roasting of an ox (I think) on Bowness Bay. I saw perch frozen in the ice, preserved as if in glass beneath my feet. Those weeks of clear ice with that background of snow-covered, sunlit, blue-shadowed hills were, forty years after, to give me a book called Winter Holiday for which I have a sort of tenderness”.
Licenced today: a street in Poundbury, Dorset, and the offices of Poundbury Wealth Management…
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