I have no issues with the cold. It comes every year, for goodness sake, and there is a wealth of expensive kit available for those who need it, or just want it. However, I do remember the arrival of it, overnight and me all unprepared with those skinny windows and the ensuing freeze of water pipes and the whole damn struggle to just get through the day without becoming the frosting on an island cake. It’s different now, when it comes. I have a cosy home and no sensible windows in such places are ever single-glazed. But I still remember, and not with regret at all, but more with questions. How the hec did we all survive it, those fifteen years, that first one, when everything froze including the inside loos, and every single morning for weeks? How did we break the frozen silage up with forks and swearing so the Galloways could feed? How did we break up water barrels for sheep more than thrice in a day? How did we make sure our children got some sleep? Well, we did, and they all survived.

Now, with inside heating and expensive fashionable snow gear (even to collect a child from primary school), it seems the cold is solved. But it isn’t. It is just ignored. Like so much in this captious life, the life that demands better street lighting, better this, better that, and which doesn’t want to know about where we are and what might be coming, there is a big denial.

When I, an ignorant town girl married an older man, wise in country functions and curious about life, I began to learn. Even then, in 1972, there was information out there. I remember that too, being told about a much bigger world than I knew, or had known. My world was all about the bubble within which I lived. It fascinated and alarmed me and we talked about that, his calming words. It didn’t throw me upwards onto the street, to buying snow kit for winter, although I did, even if it constituted yellow plastic over at least six warm layers. We audibly crackled on those winter feeding hilltops, our wellies lined with silver foil and our feet forgetting what they were until we reminded them before the aga, reviving them through the pain of a returning blood flow.

When I say the cold is being ignored, I probably mean a turning away from it. We don’t like it, it shivers us with its message of long, very long, dark months, and with the promise of an increase in its intensity. It creeps under doors and whistles through gaps and ill-fitting windows. It is almost sentient in intent and so we bulk up to go out and buy fleece and wool for sitting indoors. It is the same with the dark. Darkness is menacing, blinding, comes too soon and stops the dawn light as if it is the one with all the strength. But if we could, as our ancestors did, just accept the shift of seasons, particularly from autumn to winter and from day to night, we would be prepared and ready, even welcoming, instead of being somewhat astonished at the damn nerve of their annual arrival. We are so quick to reject both winter and the longer stretch of darkness that we can make it personal. We can decline, grow inwardly weaker. However, I have found that to teach myself to enjoy both, to watch them arrive, to really feel the exhilaration of cold wind on my skin, to love the warmth of a merry fire, to prepare winter food, nourishing and thick and to pull on whatever I need for a walk in between showers, brings me peace and acceptance. Candles burn as darkness takes over, throwing a soft flickering glow into the room. In this place of no traffic, the silence is almost deafening. There is no light pollution so that, on a clear night, the stars are in their millions. Owls call as they hunt. Stags roar their challenges from distant woods across the sea-loch. Nobody calls and it seems as though all is well with the world.