Cold Snap

Winter's come to the South East belately, settling on North London in sustained flurries. And here in Meteor Street we're starting to take on a Moscow air to our daily lives. We're huddled, sick and miserable and very much aware that it's only Tuesday. Somehow the promise of Spring isn't going to be enough to sustain us until Friday, which is why I'm breaking out the fur hat, unscrewing the Smirnoff and taking an early night. No wonder it took the good people of Moscow a good seventy springs before they managed to throw out communism.

It's the worst kind of cold outside, the type you still carry with you even hours later. Just going about our daily business of working and battling germs seems enough to suck the life out of us even before we go about the more important extras like going out and having lives. I seem destined on nights like this to write the kind of prose that would make Hunter S. Thompson, sitting at his desk with a typewriter and a browser, put out his nearest handgun and put himself out of his misery. No-one seems to know why he did it; but it seems a fair bet that a week of heavy snow could make even the most vain writer lose the will to leave. But it's only a vodka and tonic for tonight.

Maybe if we all make it through the week without succumbing totally to viruses and gloom I might just think I've managed to achieve something this week. But so far it doesn't seem that way. A good cold snap is a good thing in the long run; it kills off all the bugs and might even get rid of our mice, who have been strangely absent this week. More importantly, we carry the memory of weather like this when Spring finally arrives on the scene, and we wouldn't appreciate warm weather all the year round.

At least the heating's working fine. I have a date with a duvet and a dream of a long pointless boat trip at slow speed on a hot day.