Snow is a great leveler; it’s make-up for the ugly urban world. My own hometown of Grangemouth certainly looks better when it’s completely covered in the white stuff (not a drug reference, though I can see why you went there). More’s the pity that the snow hasn’t ever lain deep enough to completely submerge half the town’s people, too, despite my constant prayers to the Christian God, the Norse and Aztec gods, and the ghost of Eddie the Eagle.
My relationship to snow and cold has changed over the years, as it does for us all. As a kid I used to pray to Igloonia, the wholly invented God of School Closures, to bring me enough snow to crush a carousel of cathedrals. Even in mid-June. The older you get, though, the more you realise that snow isn’t something to be coveted, but a potentially fatal ingredient in your day-to-day life. This is especially true where your boss is concerned, as undoubtedly they will expect you not only to drive in it no matter how bad it gets, but – if needs be – muster up a team of huskies, fight off seventeen hungry polar bears, and eat your own left arm to escape from an ice cave into which you’ve fallen after tripping over two of the huskies as they were attempting to rut each other.
Ice, of course, brings its own unique perils, especially for the elderly, a group I didn’t think I’d have to start identifying with until at least 2040. That changed a few months ago when I had my first slip-and-fall. I used to scoff at the fallen, and wonder why they didn’t just wear appropriate foot-wear or choose their steps carefully, the great bloody idiots. I’m now firmly on team ‘Great Bloody Idiot’. Worse still, I managed to take my youngest son down with me when I slipped. You’d think the paternal instinct would kick in and you’d unclasp your hand from his in in the instant of capsizing but, no. Apparently not. I yanked him down with me as surely as if I’d been an anchor around his legs. Luckily we were on a dirt-covered forest path and not a concrete pavement. Luckier still, he wasn’t hurt at all, unlike his soft-boned dad who absorbed the full impact of the fall with his shoulder and elbow, and let out a whirlwind of sweary words. It still hurts intermittently. I get an ache, and find myself pulling a face like a man suddenly forced to sook sixteen bitter satsumas, and that face is always followed by a lingering, wholly involuntary, old-man-ish ‘ooooooooo’. It’s very sexy. When you’re young you can recover from anything. When you’re middle-aged (as I *almost* am) you can cripple yourself bending down too fast to pick up the TV remote. And that shit never heals.
Your perspective on winter changes again once you’ve had kids. You get a vicarious thrill from their excitement and anticipation of the snow to come, and will move heaven and earth to get them out and about galloping and cavorting in the fluffy, crunchy drifts.
The snow’s arrival during lockdown-three succeeded in making the prisons our towns have become more palatable. Kids were happy again. Sure, they couldn’t go to the library or the soft-play or the swimming baths, but they could run outside, gather up clumps of frozen water vapour and throw them in each other’s eyes until they cried with rage. They could pick up a sheet of moulded plastic and toboggan down a stretch of hill that only the day before had been an uninspiring clod of green and brown that presented very little danger to life and limb.
It’s worth remembering, though, that snow can bring tears of misery as much as shrieks of joy, something that the happy, jolly Christmas movies and winter wonderland story-books don’t tell you. My kids know this, though.
About three or four years ago when my eldest child, Jack, was in nursery, I stole him away from his classes (I say ‘classes’: at that age they just sort of run about the place putting bogeys everywhere) to take advantage of the great dirty dollop of snow that had just deposited itself on top of the town. Grangemouth is at sea-level, a place devoid of slopes (and hope, but that’s by-the-by), so we ventured up into the Braes area of Falkirk to Quarry Park, and its medley of slopes of varying levels of deadliness. Jack was young, so I thought it best to select the least deadly slopes for his first shot at sledging, because I’m a good dad that way. Not killing my children is pretty high up my list of parental objectives.
Most of the time.
Jack looked adorable in his snow-suit; he was a plastic toy Eskimo you could pick up and put in your pocket. We prepared an arsenal of snowballs and peppered trees with them. We jumped and rolled in the soft, static avalanche that had engulfed the park. And, of course, we sledged. After an hour or so Jack was complaining about being cold and having a sore leg. Kids, eh? I chided him for being such a moaning Minnie on such a fun and snowy day, and took him down the slopes a few more times before we called it a day and headed back to the car. What a mis-matched, slightly dangerous toboggan team we made, barrelling down the hill like something out of the Wacky Races. Or Hagrid and Tyrion Lannister.
When we reached the car, Jack was sobbing. I was ready to gently chide him again for being a pint-sized killjoy when I noticed, after pulling off one of his welly boots, that most of his leg was encased in snow, and his soaking wet sock sheathed a foot that had become a shiny pink ice-cube. I quickly realised what had happened. I’m smart that way. The legs of his snow-suit should have been pulled down over the tops of his wellies. By not doing this, I’d inadvertently converted his wellies into high-speed snow-scoops. The poor wee lad had become half a Yeti, and I, his loving dad, had told him to shoosh when he’d complained to me that his leg was about to fall off. Great, I thought to myself. I’m the sort of dad whose wife writes into Take a Break to expose them in the section entitled, ‘Aren’t Men Absolutely Useless Twats?’.
When the snow fell again a month or so ago I resolved to let my children enjoy it without risk of hypothermia-related amputation. My youngest, Christopher, was now old enough to join the fray, sledge-and-all. The only challenge was in getting out of Grangemouth’s billiard-table flatness and up to the hilly goodness of Quarry Brae now that the snow was starting to fall quite heavily. I did what any sane person shouldn’t: I asked a Facebook community group for guidance. What an exciting time: my first online quarrel in a community group. You’d think instead of having asked: ‘How safe is it to venture up to the Braes from Grangemouth with my mega-excited young children?’ I’d asked them: ‘How much crack can my children safely ingest before its levels start to detract from, rather than enhance, an episode of Paw Patrol?’
The responses to my query were split somewhere in tone between, ‘Hope you have a nice day, child murderer,’ and ‘F*** the system! Take them sledging! Hell, rob a bank after it using the sledges as koshes! In for a penny, in for a pound.’ One woman in particular raised my hackles, condemning me as a reckless and unfit parent, but I saw it as a not inconsiderable victory that I managed to bait her into calling me a dick-head, resulting in Zuckerberg doling out a caution. It’s the little things in life that warm the heart, isn’t it?
It’s a seven- to ten-minute drive from my house to Quarry Park. I did a dry-run first, with just expendable old me in the car, to make sure that it was safe. It was, so I bundled the kiddies in the car and drove to Polmont. I parked the car in a dead-end street where the council had just shut the road so that maintenance could be carried out on the bridge over the canal.
We scampered out of the car and scrunched our way up the hill. The kids’ initial enthusiasm for trailing their own sledges behind them was soon replaced by a keenness to see me stumbling through the snow like some vast plastic octopus. At the top of the hill where the bulk of the sledging was taking place we met my friend, Duncan, and his girlfriend Angela, along with Duncan’s young son, Jack. Excitement and histrionics were the order of the day, as the two Jacks variously cavorted, competed, fought, and occasionally turned their semi-cruel Darwinian attentions upon young Christopher, as young boys are want to do. At one point in the afternoon Jack and Jack lay in the snow some twenty feet from each other, in a mutual huff following a snowball fight gone awry. Now and again they uselessly kicked at the snow at their feet in the vain hope that it might somehow injure the other. Little boys fall out quickly, but reconcile just as quickly; before long they were rushing and giggling after each other across the park, leaving spiraling contrails of merriment in their wake.
This was Chris’s first time sledging, so it was an honour and a delight to ride shotgun with him, and hear the excitement scree from his lips so tangibly you could almost see it floating through the air in a speech bubble. Here’s to those magical first times: first steps, first plane take-off, first plane touch-down, first sledge-sesh, first time they pee in your face, first time they storm out of a room telling you that they hate you. These are the moments that make life worth living.
Jack was, by now, a sledging veteran, and thus more inclined towards recklessness. We all decided to leave behind the gentler slopes and wander over to the near-sheer slopes that fringed the circumference of the park. Some older kids were taking it in their strides, thundering down that hill at what seemed to be – to this old fragile bag of bones, anyway – terminal velocity. What the hell, I thought. I’m going to do that, too. On my way down I almost hit a tree with my balls, and covered the last section of the slope sans sledge, but my boys were impressed, so that made the trip worth the slight reduction in dignity. Unfortunately, my eldest, Jack, perceived my have-a-go abandon as the throwing down of a gauntlet. I cautioned him against sledging down that particular Matterhorn, but felt myself torn between the impulse to protect him from potentially dangerous stunts, and the counter-urge not to stunt his will and bravery. He assured me that he would be fine. I hoped he would be.
He wasn’t.
Everything was going swimmingly – or sledgingly, if you prefer – up until the last seven-eighths of the slope, at which point Jack’s brain began to process the full terror of the speed his body was travelling at, and in panic forced his limbs and torso to perform a full sledge-ectomy. Jack’s arm, bum and pride were bumped. A few cries and cuddles later I managed to coax him out of his mild histrionics by acting like a goofball – something I excel at, if I do say so myself. Minutes later Jack was agitating to go back to the top of the slope for a second attempt. This time, I decided it was best to err on the side of not having a son with a broken leg, and we all wandered back to the gentler slopes for one last slide before going home. We carried out our final sledge as a pack. Adults and kids, all of us careening down together. Unfortunately, a miscalculation on Jack’s part and the impossibility of reversing a sledge on Duncan’s part sent Duncan’s sledge thumping into a capsized Jack. This time, it was a little harder to make Jack laugh it off.
Jack, Chris and I hobbled back down to the car like soldiers after a war, me carrying Jack and dragging a rats’ tails of sledges clattering at my back. Why did our sledging trips always end with calamity? Granted, Chris had had a happy, wholly accident-free time, but, really, 50 per cent satisfaction rate isn’t the figure you should be shooting for as a parent. To make matters worse, when I tried to pull away in the car I found that my wheels could do no more than spin uselessly in the fresh snow drifts that had gathered in that abandoned street. It was as if the collective negativity of the Facebook community group with which I’d traded banter had formed itself into a curse, a great big ‘I told you so’ from the virtual world to the real world. That woman who’d called me a dickhead was right.
‘Dad, I just want to go home,’ came Jack’s plaintive moan. The accelerator was no help, despite me repeatedly pressing down on it with continued disregard for the very obvious lack of any tangible benefit. Is it a man thing? Something doesn’t work, so just keep doing it until it does, even if it never does, then repeat until red in the face and shaking your fist at the heavens, ready to have an inverted-rage heart attack. Thankfully, the kindness of passing strangers saw us on our way. One little push and we were heading home, with me issuing as many verbal distractions as possible to take Jack’s mind off of his latest sledging horror. ‘I don’t like sledging, daddy,’ he said.
Ten minutes later we were home.
‘Daddy,’ said Jack, with a beaming smile, ‘Can we go sledging again tomorrow?’