Winnipeg in Winter

I think I am finally a Canadian. I now am getting smug about how freakin’ cold it gets here. It is a Canadian disease. It may have a contagious element or maybe repeated brain freezings bring it on. Whatever it is, it is the tendency to take pride in how ridiculously cold it gets is a particularly Canadian affliction. There is a strange pride in living in a place that can get to minus 40 degrees C. I wonder if people who live in the north of Sweden or Norway are like this and the southerners in Oslo and Stockholm have to endure northerners rabbit on about just how cold it can get up in the Arctic and how tough they are as a result and it’s a dry cold. I am sure they get asked the same question I have always asked…why on Earth would you choose to live in such a place?

So now having drunk the Canadian cool aid, I have watched with some level of glee at the fate of Britain and its complete collapse under the weight of a couple of inches of snow. It was quite amusing to see the BBC reporters talking about the country coming to a halt and the fears for the elderly as the temperature “plunged” to minus seven Celsius.

Of course, here is sunny Winnipeg it was minus 20 something and a couple of inches of snow is a light dusting. It was somewhat funny to think of those English chavs stuck in their homes with nought but pot noodles and some old tins of Hemlin. Puddles are freezing. Oh the humanity.

Now, I read that England is struggling with a rash of potholes. Welcome to my world.

Some of the pictures have been quite beautiful I must say. I think I can count on one chillblained hand the number of times it snowed in Ramsgate as a kid. Slush and it was gone the next day. Now, I am like an Innu I can tell about 20 different types of snow.

My wife asked how I dealt with my first winter here in Canada. I must say it seemed OK at the time. I had gone out and bought an absolutely ridiculous parker with a tube hood that would be good for the winter on Baffin Island. I soon ditched it in favour of the much more fashionable ski jacket. Much colder, but much easier to get in and out of a bus. I did manage to freeze my ears solid one afternoon walking to my friend’s house. Turning your ears into rubber isn’t nearly as painful as thawing them out. I did walk home one evening and was so cold I wanted to lay down and die. I elected instead to buy a car. It isn’t really as bad as it sounds – minus forty. It is just crisp and bracing and you dress for it. And you just get on with it and appreciate the heat when it arrives. It is also incredibly sunny here in the winter and the sky usually clear and blue, which is very different from the slate grey of an English winter.

There is a city here now and all the amenities of a city and lots to do in the winter. The one questions I have is those Scots who turned up here 200 years ago and said “aye, minus 40 and nowhere to live, let’s stay here!” Grand.