Winter
is coming. But don't be glum about the short days and cold winds.
There's so much to celebrate, from big coats to bonfires.
1
The drama of saying 'Winter is coming'
Say
it out loud now. It feels good, doesn't it? It makes you feel powerful
and prophetic. Now try saying it about the other seasons. “Spring is
coming.” You sound like Kate Humble. “Autumn is coming.” A weird conker
fetishist. “Summer is coming.” Boots advert. But “Winter is coming” is
sexy. It's full of drama and foreboding. You're predicting death,
essentially. You sound deep. And Game Of Thrones
has only enhanced this. Now you're not just declaring that you know the
order of the seasons, you're alluding to the fact that you watch good
drama. You're telling people you can differentiate between a dizzying
number of identically named characters. This means you're cleverer than
them. Remember that.
2
Being able to see sunrises
A few weeks ago
the only people who saw the sun rise were bakers, night workers and the
chronically sleep-deprived. In the dead of winter, the sun doesn't rise
until at least seven. Everyone sensible's awake by then, and the first
thing they see is a gorgeous pastel explosion: a sky-sized swirl of
reds, pinks and yellows that makes them awed to the point of tears to be
living on such an impossibly beautiful planet. Then they Instagram it,
and it may as well be someone's dinner or a cat's face. Seriously,
people are idiots.
3
Carbohydrates are a viable diet option again
The
tyranny of summer eating is over. No longer must we force ourselves
along to barbecues and picnics to swat wasps and check bits of chicken
for blood. Now we get to eat like civilised people: by munching on lumps
of meat and potato in a hot brown sauce indoors, while covered in a
duvet, drinking red wine and watching The One Show. We can eat hot pies,
not cold Ginsters pasties bought from a 24-hour garage because we
didn't have time to prepare anything for a picnic. We're allowed to eat
hibernation food, gorging on carbs to the point of catatonia, until we
become so filled with self-loathing that we buy the first celebrity
fitness DVD we see in January, and leave it unopened because we can't
believe we've sunk so low.
4
Winter is not summer
It isn't summer,
when you can't hide your wobbly belly under a big coat. Summer, when men
wear socks with sandals or begin marauding topless so everyone can see
the badly spelled prison tattoo tribute to their ex. Heatstroke.
Discomfort. Summer is the worst. Now, the air is getting crisper.
It becomes impossible to breathe amid pints of vaporized commuter sweat
on trains. There are log fires. There are ruddy-faced shopkeepers
welcoming you with a hearty chuckle. There are hog roasts on every
corner. There are probably lots of things I haven't just ripped off from
Dickens. Either way, we can all stop pretending to like summer for
another nine months. What a relief.
5
Halloween
This one's harder
to explain than most, but stick with me. Now, Halloween is horrible,
however you look at it. Trick or treating is institutionalized bullying,
the sort of activity that teaches children how to be Apprentice
candidates. And if you're over the age of 14 and you're thinking about
going outside dressed as a slutty ghost pirate, it's probably time to
spend a full hour standing in front of the mirror repeating the word
“Why?”
But look what we'd miss without Halloween.
The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror episodes.
Jedward's shambolic X Factor Ghostbusters performance.
The Monster Mash.
Heidi Klum's annual Halloween party,
which I treat as a reminder that, however bad my life may be, at least I
don't have to go to Heidi Klum's Halloween party. The willful
destruction of pumpkins. The boost it provides to the ailing £14.99
nylon slutty ghost pirate costume manufacturing industry. Halloween is
a good thing. You just have to think hard about it.
6
Bonfire night
I'm
talking about bonfire night here, not firework night. Firework night is
abysmal. It's not even a night any more, as far as I can tell. The
first fireworks of the year are set off at about 3pm on the first
Thursday of October and continue intermittently until the middle of
January. And they're rubbish. Fireworks are try-hard and samey. They get
boring after about three minutes. To my knowledge, nobody has ever
witnessed a full firework display without entertaining the thought of
self-immolation. But bonfire night is the bee's knees. It has a romance
that fireworks can't replicate. Holding a foil-wrapped jacket potato in
the mistaken belief that it will ever be cool enough for you to eat.
Seeing how close you can edge to the fire without being so overwhelmed
by heat and smoke that you pass out. Becoming so hypnotized by the
dancing flames lapping at the cold, autumnal sky that you convince
yourself you're an obscure pagan god-figure. Trying to eat chips with
gloves on.
7
Films stop being about exploding skyscrapers
Summer is
when Hollywood tries to make everyone so nauseous from motion sickness
that they're able to normalize widespread murder. Take this year's Man Of Steel:
a classic summer movie, in that hundreds of thousands of people die,
but we were all too busy whooping at a flying superhero to pay
attention. But now it's getting cold, films start to be about people
again. People from this planet, who barely ever have pitched battles
with armies of exploding robots on abandoned oil rigs. Admittedly it's
also awards season, so the people I'm referring to are actors and what
they're doing tends to be overblown emoting. This all culminates in the
Oscars, a 20-hour parade of self-importance and false sincerity, where
performers try to convince us that acting is a form of social justice
and not just something they did to kiss girls.
8
That bit between Christmas and New Year
Christmas
is fine, if being uncomfortably full and trying to make polite
conversation with your semi-estranged family is your thing. And New
Year, too, if you enjoy overpriced clubs full of whooping idiots. But
the real lure of the festive season is the bit between Christmas and New
Year. Festive perineum, as I wish it was called. Time slows to a crawl
and days lose all meaning. Your entire life becomes one of exquisite
boredom. It's a time for watching that box set you never got round to.
For never getting properly dressed. For eating nothing but cold meat and
Quality Street. For feeling superhumanly smug about not being a nurse,
or a shop worker, or one of those bargain-obsessed lunatics who queue
outside Next in the freezing rain at 3am on Boxing Day. It's like a sick
day where you're not drowning in mucus. It's what being kept in a
Matrix-style amniotic battery pod would be like if the robots had been
thoughtful enough to provide onesies and Matchmakers. It's the greatest leveler in the land. I'm already excited.
9
Pop-up calendar shops
I'm
bewildered as to why pop-ups are so trendy. Lining for three hours to
eat an overpriced burger in a dilapidated shed (even though there's a
McDonald's right there) isn't new or revelatory. Calendar shops have
been doing this for years. Calendar shops invented the pop-up, and it's
time they got the recognition they deserve. They dictate the thing
you'll spend an entire year looking at. Football players? Airbrushed
drawings of cars? The woman who came fourth in Celebrity Big Brother?
It's all there. I'm looking at a picture of Jason Statham right now.
Would I be if a pop-up calendar shop hadn't caught my eye last December?
Perhaps, but maybe not this specific picture.
10
The first snow of the year
When
I was a primary school teacher, lessons would come screeching to a halt
when it snowed. “SNOW!” the kids would scream. They'd smoosh their
grinning faces against the windows to take in the wonder. This, it turns
out, is something everyone does. Magistrates, funeral directors, brain
surgeons, members of
Cobra;
at the first glimpse of snow, they'll all yelp with delight, mash their
faces against the nearest window and wonder what they're getting for
Christmas.
When the first snowflake hits the ground, everything
transforms. Trains seize up. Schools close. Everybody gets a day off,
even if they work from home. The naysayers might whine that snow never
stops anything in Canada, but that's because they're genetically opposed
to fun. For the rest of us, the first snow of the year – and the chaos
it creates – is perfect. (Please note that this applies only to the very
first snowfall, and for a maximum of 24 hours. Once it turns to slush
and freezes into a rock-hard grey slab of death, or gets deep enough to
go over your shoes and make your socks wet, or stops me from doing
anything I want to do, I'm done with the wonder.)
Lord
Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in
Egypt in 1922. On March 24, 1923, novelist Marie Corelli warned him in
the press that bad things happen to those who desecrate tombs. Within
two weeks, Lord Carnarvon was dead from an infection brought on by a
mosquito bite he suffered just two days after Corelli's warning was
published. The mummy's curse caused it, of course.
.JPG "Ancient bacteria go under the lens")
