Whenever it rained when I was a child, my mother did something that seemed normal at the time yet seems quite mad looking back: she dragged the huge, heavy plants from the living room – the massive bird of paradise; the hulking clivias in their enormous tubs – out on to the patio so they could “enjoy a drink”. She came from the southern hemisphere where water was in short supply and, while she grew depressed every January and hated English winters, she never found rain less than thrilling.
Well, here we are in February after more than a month of what the Met Office is delicately calling the “unusually southerly jet stream”, what Shakespeare neatly immortalised with “for the rain it raineth every day” and what the rest of us have been summarising with the sentiment “is it ever going to fucking stop”? I’m English, so talking about rain and its related conditions occupies 30% of my personality at any given time, but most of us have hit a wall at this point. According to the weather people, 26 weather stations in the UK set new records for the highest-ever January rainfall last month and in Aberdeen they haven’t seen the sun since the iron age.
If the unremitting gloom contributes to a background condition in which everything seems bad and likely only to get worse, I would like to offer an alternative view. Even during a brighter February, it can be hard to make a case for the superiority of the British winter. Most people, afforded the choice, would go for sunny and freezing over mild and grey. For a long time I was one of them, luxuriating for 17 years in the bright blue sky of the average New York winter and thinking myself extremely clever for getting away from Britain. But this is my second winter back in this country and, having done a real number on myself, I’m here to persuade you that dank and gloomy is by far the better option. We don’t know how lucky we are!
It helps, of course, that bright and cold northern climates are suffering their own extremes this winter. The US’s eastern seaboard has experienced record-breaking low temperatures since the new year, resulting in ice floes in the Hudson, “feel-like” temperatures as low as -29C in New York and piles of snow-covered rubbish that haven’t been cleared for weeks. The last time I experienced a winter like that, it took me 20 minutes of careful layering to prepare for a three-block walk, and even then the pain of stepping out was so sharp and surprising it felt like having my face plunged into cold water. Whereas here in this damp, dull place, one of my kids recently went to school in shorts and the other hasn’t worn a coat since that cold snap in the first week of January.
There is plenty of literature dedicated to the idea that gloomy winters are an opportunity, among them Katherine May’s Wintering and a whole shelf of hygge-related Scandi self-help books. Most of these titles promote the idea that you get through these dark months via big jumpers and board games, a hibernation technique that makes a virtue of being inside and powered down. This makes sense to me, but what’s been surprising this year is that I have found being outside in the rain extremely rewarding.
I’m aware I’m in danger of drifting into woman-in-midlife-advocates-angry-cold-water-swimming territory, and I’m not suggesting we are all one stout outer layer away from forest school for grownups. I also don’t think, for example, that activities such as outdoor ice skating are ever the answer. But while we’re conditioned to moan about wet, grey days, I have found the endless rainy school runs this month weirdly lovely. Not having to wear a £300 coat that weighs as much as I do and has the word “Polartec” in its product description; the luxury of going out bare-necked in February without fear of frostbite or agonising pain, as in New York; moving through air that is just cold enough to alert one to how cold it would be if it were genuinely cold, but instead is sort of clammily brisk – all of these things seem deeply gratifying.
And at the back of my mind, always, the counter-conditioning of thinking when it rains: “Mmm, so good for my plants.” (The largest plant I own is the size of a cereal packet and has never been outside, but that, as they say, is not the point.) My point is, I think our winters are very nice indeed. All of which aside, obviously, I can’t wait for spring.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
