I suppose it’s true that most ‘older’ people or retired people don’t like winter. I’m assuming this to be the case because we would all bugger off to Tenerife for our winter if we could, wouldn’t we? All that stuff about our blood getting thinner and feeling the cold more. We wear woolly socks in bed, worn-out cardigans while watching TV and we grip our mug of cocoa much tighter than we used to as young men and women. Don’t we?
I could go on but you get the point. The theory is retired people and winter don’t mix. Very few of us choose to spend our winters in cold places. True there might be the odd skiing trip or weekend break in a cottage in the Cairngorms, but, on the whole, we like to be warm.
I only mention this now because there was a quite interesting article in this weekend’s Observer, entitled, ‘How to cope with winter: befriend it’. Oh, and the second reason is that the article prompted me to say out loud, that I love winter, can’t wait.
I’ll just talk about the article first before returning to my own part in all this loving up winter business. To be honest I thought the article had good intentions but spent an awful lot of time making what I thought to be a fairly obvious point.
Which was, as I understood it, that if you want to enjoy winter you need to have the right attitude towards it. Much ink spent on a study conducted in the city of Tromso, A Norwegian city 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Here, as the article says, the sun only offers reflected light for 2 or 3 hours a day and the sun doesn’t show up at all from mid-November to mid-January. You get the idea, it’s either make your peace with winter or move on.
A study of the citizen’s of Tromso’s attitudes to winter indicated because they liked it or ‘mental framed’* it as the article put it, seeing it as a challenge rather than a threat. By so doing they cope with it much better. The answers to a number of rather obvious statements predicted how likely they were to see winter ‘as an exciting opportunity to enjoy a glacial climate … with high levels of life satisfaction and overall mental health’.
The researcher asked participants to rate how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statement – ‘there are many things to enjoy about the winter; I love the cosiness of the winter months; winter brings many wonderful seasonal changes’, as opposed ‘to winter is boring; winter is a limiting time of year and, there are many things to dislike about winter’.
Not exactly a subtle examination of attitudes towards winter but they serve their purpose I suppose. Those people that answered with high ratings to the first set and low scores to the second saw winter as a positive time of year. Or, to put it another way, the enjoyment of winter, even for us old folk is all in the mind. True there are one or two possible physiological impediments (like frost-bite and / or hyperthermia) to our enjoyment, but nothing that can’t be counter-acted with the right attitude. Or at least the right clothes. As they say there’s no such thing as bad weather just bad clothes
So here am I and fortunately Mrs Summerhouse feels the same way (or says she does), we can’t wait for the cold weather, dark nights, counting our reasons for staying at home. We all know about hygge, there was quite a craze about it a couple of years ago. It seems the Norwegians have a similar concept and call it koselig. Or, to us, cosiness.
So light up the fire in the other room, light the candles (Mrs SH is a big fan of candles which look silly in the summer, it’s a meditation thing I believe), break out the ghost books, snuggle down in the blankets (we love our blanket collection **), throw on the heavy duvet (and I sleep much better when the nights are cold and the duvet is heavy) and mix up the mulled wine.
What’s not to like? So far so good, but does it go a little deeper than these comforters? For example might it be the case that, like the pandemic, it gives those of us who might be thought of as having a somewhat anti-social leaning, the perfect excuse to self-isolate.
And where’s the problem with that? Just as long as we stop short of the Satanic rites and child-sacrifice and keep the black magic purely as chocolates, then it’s all perfectly harmless, isn’t it? Yes, maybe we were using the dark nights and bad weather to avoid those friends we hadn’t wanted to hook up with or fight our way to the cinema because we thought we should when we could stay at home (as in the olden days) and watch same or similar on our new Sky Q box. Even that over-crowded pub can be avoided in the evening.
So bring on winter I say. Will I regret saying that when my car’s stuck in a snowdrift? No, because we’ve got a Land Rover. Or when it’s hailing outside? No because it gives me a chance to break out the cold-weather apparel – gloves, scarves, woolly hats, wellies and my quilted jackets. All brought out blinking into the cold light of a winter’s day. Just happy to be re-united.
I mean there’s nothing to stop a person wearing their Hawaiian beach shirts in winter if you’re that way inclined and have good central heating. Which we don’t at the moment on account of the problem with the cooker, but you certainly wouldn’t want to be wearing your quilted, waterproof, ski trousers down to the shops in summer. Would you? Oh, OK.
*A common strategy in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which I’ve referred to in past retirement blogs. For example, you reframe a negative ‘I hate winter’ into, ‘you know winter can be really interesting’ or in our case, can’t wait for winter, bring it on. What do you think?
**I couldn’t get the picture I wanted of people wrapped in blankets sat outside a cafe so this one will have to do. Annoying given that somewhere we have one of us in Stockholm wrapped in just such blankets.