The big freeze

I was talking on the telephone to a friend in Cape Town earlier this week and inevitably he asked me about the weather in Scotland. I told him the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and that the snows of January and February had receded, at least for the time being. “It's 30 degrees here,” he informed me. “You can give me snow any day.” As somebody born in the humid heat of Malaysia, and who prefers warmth to chill, I was ambivalent about my response to this but he went on to talk about having been in Glasgow earlier in the year and the city being in chaos.

“You'd have thought the Scots would have been prepared for snow,” he said, very much echoing my own thoughts at the time.

But then Scotland hadn't seen snow in that quantity for at least three decades.

Entire communities were cut off; families were trapped in their homes; schools were closed, and city centre streets were transformed into sheets of ice. Nobody knew what to do, least of all politicians.

Nevertheless, it was just as I remembered it back in the 1970s when a friend's car was buried under a six foot snow drift in a queue of traffic for 24 hours. Mercifully, he and his girlfriend were travelling in warm clothes and intelligent enough to open a window to bore a hole upwards for air. Alas, it did nothing for their relationship which ended abruptly the moment they were rescued.

One of my earliest memories of Scotland is as a 12 year old tobogganing down Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh with great abandon....

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• By : Roddy Martine
• In : Roddy Martine's World
• Issue : 50
• Page : 7
• Words : 787