It’s cold.

I’ve been cold all day. The kind that gets deep and makes you feel, if only for a moment, that you’ll never be warm again. I’ve been worrying that my baby is too cold. That she won’t be able to sleep. That she’ll be sad in her coldness. That my cat doesn’t have a soft fluffy bed to snuggle into because he’s always rejected any bed we’ve tried to give him.

Now, finally, I feel warm. I am in bed. I have on my dressing gown and a hot water bottle at my legs. My baby is beside me. Asleep. There’s another hot water bottle on the far side of her. She’s not the mini radiator she sometimes is, but at least her fingers aren’t icicles like they were last night. 

I actually love the cold. Despite how it gets into your bones. My family and I spent quite a lot of time in Switzerland when I was growing up and in my 20s. Mainly in the winter. At least a couple of weeks a year. (The privilege of this goes without saying but should be noted). The cold there is different, and the houses are too. So well insulated. Sometimes too warm when the heating has been on all day. You wear clothes that are actually appropriate for cold weather. People sit outside and eat their lunch under blue skies and subzero conditions — occasionally your bottle of Fanta freezes. Your vin chaud certainly doesn’t stay chaud for long. There is something about that very specific dry cold that takes me somewhere I can only describe as holy. An ember of the thrill of it glows within me as soon as we arrive, the car packed to the rafters with board games and ski boots and food for the week. I open the door of the car and am hit by it, that cold. I go inside and feel the Swiss insulation. The beautiful whiplash of the opposing temperatures. That ember grows and spreads as we make hot chocolate and discuss the week ahead. As we wake the next morning and look out the window, at the majesty of it all.

At the top of a ski lift, you might well be as close to heaven as one can be on earth. The snow is thick as anything. It looks like the cosiest bed. There is no other way to witness it — you have to drag on your boots and long johns and crunchy trousers and Michelin man it up the mountain on a cable car or a chair lift (a particularly special way to experience the cold — your fingers freezing trying to take a photo of the view and your nose so numb you can’t feel it dripping).

I’m not going to the mountains this year but I got a little taste of the thrill of it, when it snowed this week. Just a smattering. An embarrassing amount really. But it was white and it fell overnight and then didn’t disappear because the temperature stayed so wonderfully cold. The skies were primary blue. I walked through woods with my baby and my parents and the ground crunched under my feet. I left the house to find a cosy cafe to do some writing in and as I scraped the ice from my car windscreen, a woman walking by and I discussed the thick flakes falling on our heads. A point of connection, the cold. Very British.

So I’m having a great January so far. Thanks almost entirely to the cold. Our house is freezing, build in the 1800s and terribly insulated, but it makes the fire even more satisfying. The way it crackles. And climbing into bed to feed my baby, holding her tightly while I listen to an audiobook and let my eyes grow heavy, I feel so content. It is one of the greatest privileges to be warm inside when it is cold outside. It makes me so very grateful for all I have, and I can’t wait to see the mountains again.