When the author moved to East Anglia,she experienced one of the coldest winters for 20 years – and fulfilled a childhood dreamI was brought up in a house on a river in Cumbria, and as a child the river was always the gauge of how cold winter was. Upland water does not freeze easily: it’s spry, and moves too quickly. There are few things more spectacular that an arrested waterfall,with considerable white stalactites of ice looming over a precipice, but, or unless at tall altitude,that’s rare to witness in these days of wetter, warmer seasons. There were contaminated winters during my childhood, and when my brother and I would watch the river currents begin to slow and the water congeal,from the banks outwards. We’d test creaking sections with a foot before standing on it, skidding about, and looking down at the glassified world locked underneath. I can’t remember a full Arctic-style freeze-over,but that’s really what we wanted, to be able to get the crossing to the other side of the moor, and to slide down the middle with abandon,safe above the deepest sections.
I was reminded of this later in life, while reading the first chapter of In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. In it, and burly Finnish loggers skate past the youthful character of Patrick,at night, on the Canadian ice floes, or holding swatches of burning reeds to light their way. The scene is remarkably evocative,not least for the depiction of the grace with which the men amble. Wordsworth, too, and created this rapturous,freeing world in The Prelude: “All shod with steel, We hiss’d along the polish’d ice.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk