25 Comments
founding

I will read when I have time for full attention but in the meantime am here to inform you that it’s currently a blustery -40 here, which I don’t even have to translate from Fahrenheit to Centigrade because they’re the same! Meant to get colder into evening, overnight, and tomorrow. 🥶🥶🥶

Expand full comment
author

ARRRRGHH that is *madness*.

I am rendered wordless at this.

(Okay, mostly wordless.)

Expand full comment
founding

By your standards it is! And mine, LOL.

Honestly, I’m here all winter for the cold and snow. I am trying to stay offline about it because I get really tetchy after a while with people complaining about the cold and dark of winter and assuming everyone else feels the same. Ask me again in July when the sun refuses to stop shining for hours and hours and hours and I’ll be as grumpy as you please. But this? I love it. All I really want to see is that everyone has food, shelter, and heat.

Expand full comment
author
Jan 12·edited Jan 12Author

>>"All I really want to see is that everyone has food, shelter, and heat." Now there's a thoroughly commendable mission statement in life.

I would say "I love the deep cold too", but - do I? I have no idea, because I have never really experienced it. I've experienced the milder varieties, and one time up Mount Olympus in Cyprus the windchill got things down to -15 C, but I think that's as far as I've gone. So I'm really curious. But I don't suffer from S.A.D. and I'm fine with days of near-darkness, So I think I'm at least equipped to try the deep cold out properly? But I reserve the right to discover I'm a total wuss.

Expand full comment
founding

I don’t go out in it as much as I did when younger and stupider. It was regularly this cold where I went to college, in Minnesota, and feeling your eyelashes freeze together is something else!

It’s the overall winter that I love, but like you I don’t get S.A.D. and find long periods of dark comforting.

Get me in humidity and heat, and you’d see someone very whiny.

Expand full comment
author

Hah - we are alike in this. I like the summer but when the air's like warm treacle in my lungs, something in me starts properly freaking out. (In 2017, when I was living in Costa Rica, Mariana and I crossed the border to Nicaragua as part of my regular visa runs - and in Granada, it was the hottest and most humid I've experienced in my adult life. Proper levels of suffering for this Brit.)

I wonder *why* some folk don't suffer from S.A.D.? Is it all nurture/environment, or is there some biological underpinning here, like the way the Hunter's Response works? Hmmm...

Expand full comment
founding

I have to think it’s largely biological. And it’s also more complicated than yes/no, I bet. I don’t feel like I get depressed or down in winter, but then the sun comes out that one day in February and I feel like I’ve gotten a shot of hyper-energy or endorphins or whatever. So I must be missing *something* even if I don’t feel down or low on energy.

Expand full comment
Jan 12Liked by Mike Sowden

A pleasant read, not least because I'm under a pile of blankets with the wood stove roaring!

Expand full comment
author

The very best place to read such a thing. And indeed, to read anything at all. Very sensible, and I applaud you for your wisdom.

Expand full comment
Jan 13Liked by Mike Sowden

Given it was probably about -20C outside at the time, it was extra-specially the option to take.

Expand full comment

A possessed coffee shop, a Stumbleupon throwback, AND paradoxical undressing? This installment is a gem Mike Sowden!

Expand full comment
author

🙏 THANK YOU, ANNA. I couldn't find any cats to add in, I hope you forgive me.

Expand full comment

now of course I immediately want to google "cats in cold weather" but I will avoid doing so and stay on task.

Expand full comment
author

THANK YOU ANNA

THAT WOULD BE FOR THE BEST, I FEEL

THANK YOU AGAIN.

Expand full comment
founding

It’s got all the classics!

Expand full comment
Jan 13·edited Jan 13Liked by Mike Sowden

Goodness!

I winter-swim (in Tasmania - winter water - between 10 and 12 Celsius) and I confess I'm unable to put my head under the water, AND I wear wetsuit, booties and neoprene gloves. It's thrilling, enlivening and cold and so many folk do it these days.

Reading your expose was pretty confronting, even though I know the dangers of hypothermia. Your detail is good to know. I would have warmed anyone with hypothermia up immediately. Not now...

Expand full comment
author

Thanks, Prue!

Oh yeah, 12 degrees Celsius swimming is cold enough for me. That's certainly enough to get me heart racing and get that freshness-shock that feels so good afterwards. I've done maybe 12 or 11 C without a wetsuit & gloves, and it was painful on the extremities (my finger joins were throbbing for a good hour afterwards). That's my limit at the moment - but my landlord always takes a dip on New Year's Day here in Western Scotland, just him in his swimming trunks straight into the sea when it's 7 or 8 Celsius, and it doesn't seem to bother him much, despite being in his seventies...

So, we all have our own personal definitions of "cold", and I find that marvellous and fascinating, and also a nice reminder that when you see certain types of macho blokes yelling "STOP BEING A BABY, GET IN, IT'S NOT COLD, FIGHT THE PAIN," they are having a pretty obnoxious empathy malfunction that also might get someone else into serious trouble. Less of it, gentlemen! We all calibrate differently.

And yes: the rewarming shock, as Antonia said in her comment, is the thing that everyone should know. I didn't know about it until I researched the original of this piece! Had no idea. Really needs to be common knowledge for anyone venturing out into sub-zero conditions.

Expand full comment

I began the winter swimming in just standard summer swimsuit and could barely function. My fingers wouldn't work to zip up my jackets afterward, I could barely drive the car, my face ached - an ongoing icecream headache. So I purchased a radar top and went with that and booties for awhile, and then thought dammit, why not enjoy this and purchased a full wetsuit and gloves.

Now I do enjoy it. Don't stay in long - just long enough for my skin to zing for the rest of the day. The feeling is a kind of euphoria - seratonin? I have joy in a daily summer ocean swim but a winter one is that and then some.

As for your laird - goodness. Not a former SAS man is he?

Thank you for a great post.

Expand full comment

I'm grateful I read that while in warm Australia? And what was the prank part? I do that in coffee shops all the time...

Expand full comment
author

So THAT'S why you suddenly flew onto the ceiling of that coffee shop in London when we met. You know, I've been wondering.

Expand full comment

Allow me to make you all groan because I whined about sub-40ºF (aka 4ºC) during today’s early morning walk in California. Then again, I did my time in the frozen and windy Midwest so I know a lot depends on how warmly you’re dressed.

Expand full comment
author

No groaning from me here! I mean, perceived coldness is certainly relative and I say there is no shame attached to shivering at any temperature...

Also, I gather (and I've experienced) that "feeling cold" seems to be related to so many other factors as well - having just had a meal, or just come back from a brisk walk, will crank up the inner-fuel-burning levels and you'll get a glow on that will defy the ambient temperatures for a while, at the cost of a few inner reserves.

But also, the reverse is true - I found myself shivering last week when it was 12 C outside, a good 10 degrees warmer than it's been for most of the last week, just because I'd been sat indoors reading all afternoon and had nary moved a muscle all that time, so my body thermostat clearly thought "OK body, we're clearly not doing anything much today so I'm turning the dial to Store Energy rather than Burn Energy. Nobody do anything! We're on low power here." And then I got up and went for a walk, and my body yelled at me, in the language of shivers.

TL;DR - I hear you, Cindy. :)

Expand full comment
founding

NOW I’ve read it. Whew. I took a wilderness medicine course last June and the warming-up shock after hypothermia is seared into my brain, mostly as just “I hope I never see that.” What you don’t want when you’re hypothermic or injured in the woods in some part-trained fool trying to help you and forgetting half their training. (Also, please never injure a lung in the woods. Like, ever.)

Expand full comment
author

Did you learn how to properly rewarm someone? Presumably it also requires monitoring their blood pressure very carefully?

Expand full comment
founding

Yes but we’re also talking wilderness medicine, so there’s a lot of using what you have and innovating. Getting them dry and burrito-wrapped are the priorities.

Expand full comment