Re: Dressing for the weather


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Posted by Robert Dilley on January 26, 2004 at 13:09:40 from 216.211.5.173 user rdilley.

In Reply to: Re: Dressing for the weather posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on January 26, 2004 at -1:46:09:

We were obliged to wear shorts until the third or fourth form (grades 9/10) I forget which, regardless of weather. I explain my reluctance to wear shorts today on that.

I remember an "offical" (teacher-led) walk in the early 50s when we were forced to have a snowball fight and forbidden to wear gloves. Some of the boys (no girls at my school -- though it is now a girls' private school) were crying with the pain by the time we got back. I don't know whether schoolmastering attracted sadists, or if it brought out latent sadism.

The winter of '62 -- how well I remember that. I often get asked how I can stand the winters in Thunder Bay. I point out that I was never so cold in my life as in my second year at Cambridge, when the North Sea froze for some distance off shore, the winds came howling in from Siberia and my toothpaste froze in the bathroom. No central heating; no insulation in the walls; no proper winter clothing; pre-North-Sea gas heating quite incapable of keeping up with demand. I still shiver to recollect it.

Here, we have a few minutes misery walking in from the parking lot, or waiting for the bus. But homes are properly heated (for the time being, anyway); clothes are designed for the cold and everyone is prepared for winter instead of regarding it with surprise every time it arrives (from back in the 40s I can picture houses in London with their water pipes on the *outside* of the house where they could freeze and burst much more conveniently).

AR, as ever, was being true to the behaviour of his day; blue knees and all.

Incidentally, I cherish a picture of my girls building a sandcastle on a beach in Cornwall in August during a stay in the UK in 1988 -- wearing their Canadian winter snowsuits.



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