Not Going Out

We get around to December and all our preparations for Christmas look like a siege. We declare the last shopping day before Christmas, the last trip out, the last set of Christmas cards written and posted. After that, we close the doors against the world and don’t go back out into the traffic again. We’ve walked to the local wood for a session of carols around the bonfire, walked to neigbours’ houses, but no more daft trips out to the beach, no more journeys to relatives’ houses and definitely, no more shops.

Our last trip out this year was to see the Christmas decorations at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. The photo above is of the Marble Hall at Holkham, before the decorations went up. It was a birthday treat for Himself, chosen to get us into the mood for Christmas. We’d gone for a candle-lit tour of Audley End in autumn 2019, and since then ill health and lockdowns had stopped any such outings.

It was spectacular. I won’t spoil the surprises for anyone with a tour booked, but if you didn’t manage to get there you can see the tour of the hall filmed by Channel 4 if you tune in at 8pm on December 22nd. The rich can certainly do it differently – their decorations took over the entire room. What cheered us up was that their decorations looked fantastic, but many were composed of small items saved from previous years’ displays and others were put together from left-overs, broken cases, scraps of wood. We could probably put up a display just as impressive (though much smaller).

The interesting insight came from a volunteer manning the gate as we left that evening. We stopped to chat, aware all the time that we had just finished the last tour of the night and that every person on the staff was preparing to shut down and go home. She listed out the number of staff at the hall. It was less than the number of staff needed to maintain the buildings and canteen for the much smaller office block where I used to work.

We drove home carefully. The temperature had dropped to two degrees above zero on our way there, and I switched the car on to find it was now zero, dropping to minus figures within minutes of setting out. We’d been warned that the weather would turn cold on the north Norfolk coast, but as we drove home it dropped to minus half, minus two, minus 2.5 before settling at zero by the time we arrived home.

Since then, the entire east coast of Britain has been hit by a blast of freezing weather. The threat of light snow and minus three last week turned into 10cm of snow, icy roads and cars stuck in every ditch and hedge for miles around. Motorways across the south and the north of Britain were closed by multi-vehicle crashes and cars went skating on minor roads. Our county council claimed to have salted our road, but maybe they have some kind of stealth salter… certainly nothing passed our house between 8am and midnight. By 9pm, there’d been so many crashes at the junction to the west and on the gentle hill to the east that no traffic at all disturbed the snow on the road outside our house until the early hours of the next day.

The snow is still as deep and widespread, a week further on. The temperature hasn’t risen above zero for more than a couple of hours a day, and the lowest low of the region was recorded at an official weather station a few miles from here – minus ten, not as bad as Braemar’s minus fifteen but bad enough. It’s due to drop further this week. It will be a few weeks or months before we understand how tough the damage has been to our trees and plants. Roses, geraniums, nasturtiums and fuschias were still sporting flowers the night before the freeze started, and the chard and kale was still as good as autumn. Now? I have some scraping up and composting to do when the weather clears. The good news is that this kind of cold will kill off some of the vicious bugs that attack our fruit trees in spring and summer, so we may have a decent crop. We’ve already thinking of what seeds need to be set off in January.

Here’s to next year’s crop.