Turned out nice again?

Jan 15 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

"THERE is a lot of it about,” said the man with a tremble in the flush of his face, which told of the sad and steady slip in the level of gin in his bottle and a certain world-weariness.

But my expression must have seemed unresponsive, as I stood in the shop doorway, measuring the comparative merits of broccoli and cauliflower. For he repeated the observation, a gloomier tone coating the words, cunningly drawing me into conversation.

The village bus shuddered at its stop. Flustered old ladies grabbed the bar to haul themselves on board. It was a damp, grey day, uncertain of its season.

“A lot of what about?” I asked, wondering what he had in mind – frisking in the meadows, litter, faith, birdsong, cultural beanos, charity, rain, hope, disappointments, or anything else that comes in abundance.

“Illness,” he said, nodding his head slowly in the manner of a sage.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s that time of year, though we haven’t had any winter to speak of.

“People are dropping like flies,” he continued, warming to his theme. “No sooner are you over the diarrhoea than your nose starts to dribble. The elderly and those in late middle-age are particularly badly affected.

“By the way, how old are you?”

“Let me see now,” I replied casually, gazing at the sky in a gesture of mock calculation, implying the imminent arrival of a new decade had not occurred to me. “As it happens, I’m approaching 60, with a creak here, a wheeze there and a prayer somewhere else.”

“You look more,” he said, rubbing a thumb over the puckered skin of a tangerine, the phantom of a smile gliding across the pale blue of his eyes.

“By jove, aren’t you the cheery one,” I said, before hastily changing the subject by pointing at a crack on the pavement between us.

“Do you think we should take that to a gallery as a sculpture, suggesting that the split symbolises the divisions in society.”

“Oh, you’re thinking of that cracked floor shown at the Tate Modern in London,” he said. “It was acclaimed as a work of genius by all the critics in their lumberjack denims with the smell of olives on their breath.”

“Indeed, I was thinking of that,” I said, smiling broadly.

“Suddenly you’re looking much younger, but don’t we live in crazy times?” he said.

“Yes, crazy times,” I said, “but be of good courage.”

Courage, now that’s a word you can’t really define, as it means so many different things. Of course, boys were always brave in their dreams. But then we had real winters. When you woke up, the snow was banked in each corner of the window. Only the postman’s footprints and the stray dog’s paw-marks could be seen in the rolls of snow. Front-doors shut and muffled workers crunched into the flurry, some with shovels to dig out their cars.

“More on the way,” said the wiseacre to anyone who was listening, while his fingers turned pink and the sky’s grey deepened. We were all weather forecasters then. Ooh! Soon children felt the slither of ice down their necks. Snowballs whizzed through the air.

Maybe it was never really like that, but it was enough like that to leave its trace in the folk memory. In truth, perhaps, the English winters were miserable and the snow stained quickly, though it was always thick enough to bring “chaos” to the roads.

But doesn’t the absence of a proper winter leave us emotionally deprived, as if we have been denied something our beings expect? We see films of people in other places out in their wellies and woolly hats, but it’s not our snow. More enthusiastically, we look at the old films of the snow. We were young then and everyone was a sculptor shaping snowmen with coal eyes and carrot noses.

They stood ceremoniously, slowly shrinking, in the gardens, the streets, the village greens and heaths, long after all the rest of the snow had melted.

In those days, we gathered at the bus-stops and under the shop awnings to talk of the weather, not because it was different, but because it was reassuringly predictable, far more agreeable than all this talk of fitness, exercise, diet, illness and obesity we hear nowadays.

“Turned out nice again” was either a true statement or a bleakly sarcastic offering from the woman in the raincoat. “I’m waiting for the sunny interval,” her friend would add, shaking an umbrella.

The weather was a friend and a constant subject for conversation. There’s a lot of it about now, but we don’t know what to expect any more.

* LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk