Published at 09:52, Friday, 13 November 2009

I swapped the sunny shores of the Red Sea for the North Tyne at the weekend, and came to work on Monday in the thickest pea-soup fog I have seen for many a long day.

Dipped headlights, foglights and double speed windscreen wipers did little to cut through the all-enveloping white-out.

An attempt to clear things a little with a scoosh from the washer bottle proved unwise, as the water froze instantly on the screen, making seeing even more difficult.

I have driven that road many thousands of times over the past 35 years, but I crept along like a tortoise with bunions as unfamiliar trees and bends loomed like prehistoric monsters out of the primordial soup.

I was once trying to get back to Bellingham from a meeting of Prudhoe Town Council when the dreaded foggy phenomenon sank silently down.

I crept along to the Broomhaugh roundabout, and headed north, so was somewhat nonplussed to pass a signpost indicating I was entering the People’s Republic of Kiln Pit Hill!

I have come to the conclusion that we have become soft and flabby when it comes to any weather other than sunshine.

It’s November, for goodness sake, the notorious ‘No month’, when Mother Nature traditionally revs up for the winter ahead by sending out scouting parties to see what mischief she can unleash.

When I was little, it was an unusual year indeed if there was no snow in November, and many’s the time we have had to shovel snow off the carefully gathered makings of that year’s back garden bonfire.

Mothers knew how to wrap kids up for winter when I was a lad, with gigantic woolly scarves that made Doctor Who’s look like the ribbon off an Easter egg.

They used to go round your body at least three times, before being secured at the back with a safety pin.

Another safety pin attached the scarf to the underpants of those posh enough to own a pair.

The ensemble was topped off with a strident balaclava helmet in sturdy wool, the front of which was invariably as solid and scratchy as pumice stone, through a combination of nasal detritus and the warming soup you were force fed at lunchtimes.

Your hands would be swathed in the vast mittens your nana knitted every Christmas, and the feet would be encased in thick socks and wellies.

Of course, most children of my generation still wore shorts all the year round, so there was always a sliver of bare leg on show, open to the elements.

This afforded easy access for the snow to find its way down to your feet, and gradually fill the wellie, creating the painful condition known as wellie marks – big red rings round your legs where the wet wellies rubbed on tender flesh.

Children in those days didn’t so much walk to school as waddle, long before all the present hand-wringing about childhood obesity.

They weren’t fat; they were simply weighed down by winter woollies.

Should anyone be unfortunate enough to fall over, they had to be helped to their feet by several friends, like mini-French knights being winched on to their chargers before going into battle.

And heaven help anyone who needed the loo when so attired;by the time the de-mummifying process had been completed, it was often too late.

People have completely forgotten how to drive in snow, even though it’s a mere 20 years since Northumberland County Council’s highways department had to issue a plea to motorists not to abandon their vehicles in snowy weather.

This was because snowploughs were being damaged when what appeared to be a snowdrift was a car buried up to the roof.

I recall coming to work one snow morning and seeing a car coming in the opposite direction before starting to weave, and then running up a bank and overturning on to its roof.

I rushed to the rescue, and found a lady of middle years hanging upside down from her seat belt beneath a deeply stove-in roof.

By this time several other good Samaritans had arrived, and with a concerted heave we managed to flip the car back on to its wheels in order to release the dangling damsel in distress.

To our amazement, she just stuck a gloved hand out of a shattered window and gave a Queen Mother wave, before gunning the engine and driving on, shoulders hunched beneath the squashed in roof like Bowser from Mario Kart.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk