Four hours at Terminal 5

I can imagine what it’s like for travellers with cancelled flights at Heathrow. Actually, I can more than imagine – I was in a dress rehearsal there last week.

Snow Joke

That’s quite enough, thank you; it’s beyond a joke now.

I originally thought this cold snap (what a misnomer – if a snap is what you find in a cracker, this is small nuclear explosion) was Mother Nature’s little taunt at Patrick, our producer. As if to tempt fate, he’d written these opening lines for a film we were supposed to be shooting this week: “A little girl wanders into a dark, mysterious wood. It’s the end of autumn and the trees are still sprinkled with brown leaves. Running through a deep leafy carpet, she tries to catch them as they float gently to the ground.”

We thought we’d timed it perfectly: not too soon, so there’d be plenty of leaves, yet not too late or we’d risk the January snows. We found an ideal location, booked the crew, cranes, dollies and location catering and cast a 12-year-old girl from scores of hopeful candidates. What could possibly go wrong?

I passed our chosen wood yesterday morning on my way to the airport. Not a leaf to be seen: they’re all mulched away under the snowdrifts. Instead of the dry brown carpet, it now has a shiny white floor like a television studio. You could expect Harry Hill to emerge from behind the trees with a broad grin, a couple of dancing girls and a cheeky Happy Christmas.

We’ve postponed, of course. Patrick has rewritten: “A teenage girl wanders into a wood, carpeted with daffodils.” Sadly it doesn’t have quite the same resonance.

If this weather has affected one film project, I can’t begin to imagine how disastrous it’s been to other industries in the region. On Saturday night I braved the black ice to visit my favourite Newcastle restaurant, Rasa. It was nearly empty: absolutely unheard of for a place that serves by far the best Indian food outside London. Save for a couple of frozen buskers and some semi-naked hens, the Quayside was virtually deserted. If the northeast had a mayor, he’d have declared a state of emergency.

Yet, despite the problems, I’m amazed by how calmly we’ve taken it. Despite the most unpleasant weather in memory, everything has kind of worked. There’ve been no food shortages or panic buying, all our main roads have been kept remarkably clear, trains and planes have got us in and out, and neighbourliness has smiled its way through the crisis. Rasa even managed to get its spectacular kingfish flown in from Kerala.

Sure, we’ve had no post – our icy farm track would have swallowed up the postman’s little red van – but when I eventually made it to the sorting office, our postman had it all organized. He came out with a broad smile and a large box containing the mail for our hamlet, which I then distributed like Santa to the grateful community. This weather brings out the best in northerners, and the worst in our southern compatriots.

Judging by the national headlines, you’d have thought the world had ended when a smidgeon of snow finally fell on the south earlier in the week. The Transport Secretary ordered an enquiry into travel disruption: apparently London was late to work. Yesterday I flew south to see for myself. The sun was warm, the snow completely gone. Almost everyone was wearing designer Ugg boots as they lumbered down de-iced designer streets. People spoke of Kent and Northumberland as distant heathen lands.

I drove comfortably into Berkshire and Wiltshire: there were crashed cars on the M4 every few miles, yet there wasn’t enough snow on the ground to ice a Frappuccino. The woods were amazing, sprinkled with brown leaves and golden carpets of… Hang on a minute: perhaps we should relocate our movie down there?

Snowvember

On Thursday afternoon I received a cheery phone call from the Mercedes dealership in town. The winter tyres I’d ordered weeks ago, in a quite untypical moment of advance planning, have finally arrived. Unfortunately I now can’t drive my car through the snow to have them fitted, as it doesn’t have winter tyres.




I’m resigned to leaving the wretched vehicle incarcerated in its white overcoat, like last year, until the first thaws of spring.

Enduring Northumbrian winters is like having children. The first is exciting, surprising and unbelievably beautiful. The second is just as attractive but, thanks to the experience you’ve gained from the first, rather more manageable. The third is, to be frank, just a bore and far too exhausting to enjoy: you just want it to do its thing and get to the next season as soon as possible.

This particular infant is about a month premature yet, far from being a meagre little weakling, is a big, bouncing avalanche. I can't remember the last time we had snow this early, certainly not to such an extreme degree. 8 inches landed on our drive on Wednesday night. It began falling shortly after I'd asked Jo to remind me to order some road salt from the builders' merchant. I guess they will have run out by now.

At first Izzy couldn't believe her wonderful new surroundings. She rushed round the garden kicking up white clouds and screaming "no!. no!" – she’s not very good at consonants yet. Now she's not so sure - after another ten inches dumped themselves on us last night, the snow is up to her waist.




The dogs are still excited, though I spend hours prising iceballs out of their ears. I've also been trying unsuccessfully to hack a path out for the oil lorry – we’re in danger of running out of fuel.







Meanwhile my Facebook wall is full of entries from excited friends in London swapping snowflake sightings. Their kids can’t wait to clean off their rusty toboggans and build snowmen: I just want to be able to drive to Waitrose without having to be dug out of a ditch by a tractor.

Within minutes of the first flakes’ arrival I demonstrated the typical demeanour of any Brit facing the first snows of winter: panic. Having to be in London for two important meetings, I watched the weather forecast with sinking heart and decided to fly down the night before. I knew I’d be OK, because I’d driven by the airport a couple of times and the snow wasn’t that deep.

Newcastle Airport responded by doing what airports do: closing down unexpectedly and telling its passengers nothing. So, having been summoned to the departure gate at the appointed hour, with a British Airways plane conveniently parked at the end of the jetty, we all sat down and waited to board. After an age somebody spotted that the plane in front of us was already full of passengers – it was the previous flight that had been waiting two hours for the runway to open. Our plane had apparently been circling patiently over our heads, but eventually gave up and landed in Teesside – neither plane flew anywhere that night.

Quite why the runway was shut on Wednesday afternoon remains a mystery – the weathermen had given us days of warning. I guess they must have been the wrong sort of snowflakes. It wasn’t a very good few days for Newcastle Airport as the following night a plane nearly skidded off the end of the runway. Maybe like me they’d forgotten to order their road salt. I took the train.

I felt sorry for the BBC Breakfast reporter the following morning. Sent out to report on the chaos up north, he parked his satellite truck by a busy roundabout and waited for cars to start spinning out of control. Every time they cut to him, instead of the carnage his journalistic instincts demanded, you could sense his disappointment when he could only film an orderly line of cars confidently steering through the slush. I guess they must all have had their winter tyres on.

The Social Effects of Snow

Last week my mother-in-law’s suitcase went on holiday to Hawaii. We’re all rather envious of it; we hope it might send us a postcard to remind us of warmer climes. American Airlines thoughtfully flew it there instead of letting it shiver with its owner here in Newcastle. Now, a week later, it’s probably sitting in some nice comfy warehouse waiting reluctantly to come and join us in the snow. Doubtless it will turn up the day after she flies home to California. Or perhaps the airline will just wait till the spring, by which time Izzy will have outgrown the birthday clothes the suitcase apparently contains.

I’m actually rather relieved American Airlines’ luggage services haven’t even bothered to try to deliver the thing, or rung us to tell us what’s happening, or even answered their phones for the last week. It saves us having to dig their delivery van out of the snow.

On Tuesday a very nice man arrived with a large box from Marks & Spencer. As we live at the bottom of an incline, he had absolutely no trouble getting down to us. Leaving was another matter. After an hour of shunting back and forth, each whirring wheel digging the van further into the verge beside the road, the man despairingly told us he had 43 packages on board, and we were only his third successful delivery of the day. It was five o’clock in the afternoon.

It took us until 10pm to dig, push and tow him out of the snowdrift. Did he just give up and go home, or did he carry on regardless? There’s a reality show to be made about delivery men. And another about those magnificent men in their gritting machines. Don’t listen to the people who moan on about our councils. I think they’ve done an amazing job keeping the main roads going. Even though I suspect most people have had nowhere to go and nothing to do when they get there. The entire country has frozen into delightfully anarchic inactivity.

We opened the big box from Marks & Spencer. We were curious to see what had been so vitally important as to warrant all the guaranteed next day delivery stickers. We secretly hoped it might be a giant food parcel and wondered who might have known that we were running out of unsalted butter. Beneath layers of protective wrapping was a small wooden Noah’s Ark, a present from a thoughtful godmother. It was presumably to help Izzy survive the floods when all this snow melts.

The following day some equally nice men from John Lewis arrived to lay a carpet and they also threatened to become houseguests. However, unlike the man from M&S, they had thoughtfully been provided with smart new shovels with “Never Knowlingly Undersold” printed on the side. You can tell a lot about a store by the quality of its snow shovels. It only took them a couple of hours to get out of the same snowdrift.

Britain comes alive in a weather crisis. Having done nothing but moan about our grey and wet climate all year, faced with a proper flood, heatwave or blizzard our country really rises to the challenge. What I like best is our rediscovered sense of community.

Neighbours who normally don’t speak to each other all year suddenly offer to help with groceries and path-clearing; four wheel drive vehicles cruise up and down the lanes seeking stranded cars to rescue. There’s a wartime spirit in the ice-clad car parks: supporting arms are proffered, bags carried, and everyone has an opinion. From global warming to the accuracy of the forecast, from the standard of the road gritters to the cost of winter tyres, people love to gossip about the snow. Now that it’s starting to melt, what on earth are we going to say to each other next week?

Careful What You Wish For

Having just penned several hundred words on the joys of a snowy winter, as if to show I had no idea what I was talking about, yesterday evening the icybars cascaded on Northumberland with two feet of powdery stuff: the farm looks as though a giant bailer of icing sugar has been emptied all over it. The cars are completely covered - you can't even make out the roof racks. We've been stranded in this white paradise since New Year’s Eve – I’ve photographs of our garden that would grace the lid of any biscuit tin. The whole valley is silent and the cattle in the neighbouring fields are shell-shocked. The bull is particularly grumpy and stands apart from his cows, who are huddled together round the empty feeding trough up to their rumps and sirloins in what looks like a sea of horseradish. Or maybe that’s my fantasy: our freezer packed full of sheep, the prescient gift of a local farmer. We’ll be baa-ing at each other in a few days if we can’t get out to the shops. I could murder a nice rib eye.

The dogs absolutely love it: they bounce through the powder, picking up giant snowballs of ice on their ears and legs. After a couple of hours' sledging down the big field, with dogs weaving giant spidery trails through the snow, we've spent the afternoon picking iceballs out of Truffle and Mabel's ears and trying a general dogmelt beside the Aga. Now it's time for Dorothy's Christmas Cake, iced by the children, and mulled wine with the neighbours. This must be how they celebrated Christmas in Victorian times, before global warming and Doctor Who. With the uninspiring Christmas television schedule rejected by the whole family, for the first Christmas holiday I can recall we’ve begun to open the board games we’ve given each other. Our most bizarre one is called The Clinic: it analyses whether you’re mad or not. I most certainly am, apparently. I don’t recommend it.

I’ve been trying to remember the last time we had a winter like this in the northeast. I can clearly recall my sense of wonderment at seeing the concrete emerge in the playground at Cullercoats Infants School after weeks of icy entombment. That must have been in 1957. It’s funny how snow brings back childhood memories.


It's quite nice being marooned, although Mum is due back from the South tomorrow, and Mother-In-Law flies in from L.A., so somehow I'm going to have to get out of here or they'll be staying in the Premier Inn. Bizarrely, Mum decided to book herself on the bus, rather than take the train or plane. She's travelling with her best friend Biddy. Should be a long trip - not least for the other passengers. The Volvo is daring me to take it down the lane, despite my nearly wrecking it on the ice last year. I wonder if Morpeth has a snowplough taxi service? Quite how we get out of here to pick any of them up from airports and stations is a mystery.

Best open another bottle of wine, throw a log on the fire, and let tomorrow fend for itself.

Speaking of log fires: I’m rather relieved the snow forced us to miss our friends’ New Year's Eve party. Apparently it was quite a momentous evening.

Just as Jools Holland was hooting his nanny, they suddenly heard what sounded like an earthquake inside their chimneybreast. A chimney fire is an alarming and potentially disastrous event at any time, but it’s particularly scary at 11 o’clock on New Year’s Eve. Especially when the fire engine rings to say it can’t get through the snow. Everyone rushed through the house with jugs of water to douse the flames (at one point they even tried Perrier). A solitary fireman managed to trudge through the drifts and arrived just after midnight. First footers are supposed to arrive with a piece of coal, which was the last thing they needed, but this one didn’t even have a hose. Luckily house and family survived.

I guess it made the party go with a bit of a swing, and it's certainly a talking point for the village. Make note to find a local chimney sweep. Or small boy with plenty of hair. Isn't that what they used in Victorian times?

Seasons Greetings

One of the few disappointing aspects of life in Southern California, where I spent half the last decade, was the absence of seasons. The weather went from hot to stifling and back again; roses flowered in the garden most of the year and we wore shorts almost every day.

Admittedly, every August brought terrible bush fires; desert winds whipped up the flames, brought out the news helicopters and sent clouds of black choking smoke into our back yards. Then, just when we feared the fires would consume entire communities, the October rains would come: three weeks of continuous downpours sent homes cascading down hillsides in giant mudslides. Those were our three seasons: Heat, Fire and Mud. How I longed for good old English spring. Even a few days of our chilly, wet summer would have been welcome; snow would have been miraculous.

When I returned to London, though the leaves came and went, the warmth from the city’s pollution somehow disguised each season’s true identity. We knew it was summer because there were hosepipe bans; every October our basement would flood in the storms. Even when we moved back to Northumberland, we were surprised by how mild the seasons were; we had precious little snow for the first two years.

That’s why I find this long cold spell particularly gratifying. It’s the first time I can remember waking up to a white Christmas, in a proper winter: everything lying dormant and waiting for the warmth of a fresh start. What more appropriate way to start a new decade?

I greeted the last one with feigned celebration in an absurdly opulent overpriced hotel in Mauritius. Despite it being the dawn of an entire millennium, I sensed no particular global optimism or sense of renewal. It was the most anti-climactic page turn, from one image of certainty to the next.

What a difference a decade makes. From the moment the twin towers collapsed, the safe, overindulgent world we knew began to fall apart, ending with the disintegration of our financial system and the exposure of our politicians’ greed and corruption. The long summer of confidence became an autumn of insecurity and fear. Now, though, things appear to be in stasis. It’s time for reconstruction.

I find myself anticipating 2010 with confidence. Even though, thanks to a combination of the stock market and my own profligacy, I have rather less material security than in 1999, I am seriously looking forward to the “tens” (please, let’s not call them the teens).

As I write, one cause of my optimism has just crawled under my desk. If, ten years ago, when I was 47, I’d been told I’d become a father again, I’d have laughed at the absurdity of an unnecessary distraction to my comfortably materialistic world. Now I have a wonderful giggling daughter who celebrates her first birthday next week. I race to her bedside each morning to catch her first smile; I savour every milestone. On Christmas Day she stood for the first time.

This morning I took Izzy into the garden to show her the birds eating the seeds we put out yesterday. I pointed to the snow covered ground. “Look, Izzy, snowdrops”. The new shoots are already poking through the melting snow. By the time they flower she’ll be toddling. When the roses bloom she’ll be saying “Daddy”. Next winter we’ll build a snowman together.

But my sense of optimism springs from more than just my own transformed life. Our world has changed forever and we now have a chance to make it a great deal better. My hope is for a new order in which family values and local community are placed alongside mutual respect and social responsibility; a less selfish, more concerned decade. Well, that’s my seasonal wish, anyway; and with it, my very best regards to you all.