I can tell you the exact moment I stopped thinking of cold as an enemy. I was maybe six, in Ljan, just outside Oslo, and the snow had come up past my waist. My father had that particular Cold War stoicism about weather... to him, minus ten was Tuesday. But to me, six years old and fearless in the way only children who’ve never broken a bone can be, that snow was an invitation. I dove in. Properly dove, arms first, the way you’d go into a swimming pool. And for one glorious, breathless second there was nothing... no cold, no warmth, just white silence pressing in on every side.
Then, of course, the burning started. Fingers first, then the ache spreading up through the wrists. I screamed my way back to the house and my mother, who’d clearly done this dance before, had me stripped and wrapped and fed something hot before I’d even finished crying. That’s the thing about cold when you’re small and loved... it’s never really dangerous, because someone bigger than you has already worked out how to undo it. Snow was magic. Snow was a place I went to feel something enormous, knowing I’d be pulled back out of it.
I didn’t understand yet that not everyone gets pulled back out.
Fast forward twenty-odd years and I’m sat in a Land Rover on some airfield I’m not allowed to name, guarding an aircraft that’s carrying someone rather more important than me, and it’s minus 47. Not wind chill minus 47... actual, still-air, your-eyelashes-freeze-together minus 47. RAF Police work involves a great deal of standing very still and looking alert, which is a genuinely difficult brief when your body is trying to shut down non-essential operations one organ at a time.
We had tricks. Everyone who’s done cold-weather guard duty has tricks, and none of them are in any manual. You’d run a length of pipe or hose from near the engine manifold up through the floor well of the Land Rover, and you’d stuff that warm air straight up your trouser leg. It sounds absurd written down. It was absurd. It also worked, and when you’re that cold, dignity becomes a very negotiable currency. We cooked tins of baked beans on the engine block too... balanced them just right, gave them forty minutes, and you had something approaching a hot meal that tasted faintly of diesel and tasted like salvation anyway.
What nobody tells you about extreme cold, the kind that’s trying to kill you rather than delight you, is how quiet it makes you internally. Your thoughts slow down along with your blood. You stop being clever. You become entirely animal, entirely focused on the single task of not dying, and there is no six-year-old joy left in it whatsoever. That was the cold that taught me the truth the Norway snow had been too kind to show me: cold isn’t magic. Cold is just patient. It’ll wait as long as it needs to.
Move the dial the other way entirely, and take me to Turkey with my second wife, high summer, the thermometer sitting somewhere around 42 degrees and not moving. We were staying about ten kilometres out from the main town, with a decent-sized hill sitting stubbornly in the middle of that distance, and we ran out of water. Not “getting a bit thirsty” out of water. Properly, urgently out.
So I walked. I want to be honest about this because I think honesty is the only useful part of the story... I underestimated it completely. I’d grown up associating heat with holidays, with ease, with the sort of warmth that makes you lazy and happy. I had no internal category for heat as a threat. By the time I was halfway up that hill my mouth had gone past dry into something that felt structural, like my throat had been repainted with sand. My vision did that thing where the edges go soft and swimmy. I remember thinking, with a strange detached clarity, that this was how people simply stopped walking and didn’t get up again. Not from injury. Not from drama. Just from a body that had quietly run out of the one thing it needed.
I made it. Obviously I made it, I’m writing this. But that walk lives in me differently to the Land Rover nights. The cold nearly got me through sheer relentlessness. The heat nearly got me through my own arrogance, through assuming a landscape was friendly because it usually had been.
And now. Now I live in a cave dwelling in rural Spain, and I want to tell you that this solves the problem, because in one very real sense it does. The rock keeps its own counsel regardless of what the sky is doing. Inside, it’s cool in August and merely brisk in January. It’s a genuinely extraordinary way to live, and I don’t take it for granted for a single day.
But you cannot live entirely indoors. Nobody can, not really, and certainly not out here. The chickens need feeding whether the world outside the door is minus 14, which it was this winter gone, or whatever it’s decided to be today. The rubbish needs walking to the recycling bins. These are not dramatic tasks. They are the small, boring, unavoidable admin of being alive, and they are also, right now, genuinely dangerous.
Shade temperature this week has been sitting in the high 30s. That’s the polite number, the one the weather app shows you. The floor, the actual ground you’re walking on to get to the chicken coop, has been reading around 60 degrees centigrade. Sixty. And out in open sun, away from any shade at all, even for the two or three minutes it takes to sort feed and water, you’re moving through mid-40s heat that sits on your skin like a physical weight, that makes the air itself feel like something you have to push against rather than breathe.
I think about that walk in Turkey a lot when I’m doing those chores now. I think about how close “just a bit hot” sits to “actually dangerous,” and how thin and unreliable that line is when you’re the one standing in it.
Here’s what I actually want to say, underneath all of this.
Whether you call it El Niño, or super El Niño, or simply admit what most of us already suspect... that the whole system has shifted and isn’t shifting back... the numbers we’re being handed now aren’t abstractions. They’re not headlines to skim past on your way to something else. They’re the difference between a chore taking five minutes and a chore taking you somewhere you don’t come back from.
I’ve been cold enough to nearly lose fingers and hot enough to nearly lose consciousness on a hillside in Turkey, and I can tell you plainly that neither extreme announces itself with fanfare. Both of them arrive quietly, reasonably, as “just a bit much today,” right up until they’re not. That’s the danger. Not the dramatic weather event. The ordinary Tuesday that’s crossed a line nobody drew clearly enough.
Take water with you. Take the heat seriously even when it looks like every other summer you’ve survived. And if you’ve got someone older, or someone unwell, or someone who thinks like six-year-old me once did that extreme weather is simply an adventure... check on them. Twice, if you have to.
The snow let me go, all those years ago in Norway. Not every version of extreme weather is that generous.
Until Next Time
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