Richard McComb: Happy to be stuck at home in the snow
As I write this column, I have no idea what is happening about Christmas.
The persisting “snow event,” as it is so charmingly called by the telly weather bods, has wreaked havoc with our plans, as it may well have done with yours.
Obviously, I am feeling smug that we cannot afford to fly out to the sun and have been taking a very unseasonal pleasure in stories of frozen airports and travellers bedding down in turkey foil on departure lounge floors.
“Look at that,” I said to my wife and children as the “Breaking News” revealed absolutely nothing had changed in the last 24 hours.
“If I’d had a successful career, that could have been us. Stuck at a miserable airport with losers and strangers. Think yourselves lucky.”
Still, a trip north to Mother-in-Law-on-Sea looks doubtful. Our rear-wheel drive Teutonic motor takes to snow as an elephant does to ice skating.
The dear old car can’t make it out of our street. We’d be better off getting the cat to pull us along in a sledge and Millie is not very good at that at all, just hopeless with instructions.
Naturally, I turned my charm on the motoring correspondent to see if he could come up with a modest four-wheel-drive vehicle, perhaps a top spec Range Rover. At a push, I’d consider a Volvo or one of those drug-dealer Porsches.
I told Our Man in the String Back Gloves it was his chance to save Christmas for the McComb kiddies. He’d be our very own Father Christmas, I said.
He told me to get knotted.
So, despite the absence of Caribbean sun, we are stuck in our own Christmas limbo, facing the possibility of being home alone. Stuffed.
And do you know what? I’m rather relishing the whole unpredictability of the situation. Years ago, such an uncertain outlook would have stressed me out. I’m a man who likes a plan: I devour timetables, itineraries, lists, map cordinates, print-outs of local customs.
But what with the ice and the white stuff, it’s all rather wonderfully gone out of the frosty window.
We will be disappointed not to make it to see our family and the children will be miffed not to hear grandpa play “When the red, red robin goes bob, bob, bobbin’ along ...” on his electric organ, but we can delay things, go another time, take the long view.
If we are snowed in, it raises the scintillating prospect of last-minute food shopping as we have nothing ordered. Will there be goose and figgy pudding for Christmas Day? Or will we be defrosting mince as a prelude to Yeo Valley yoghurts?
I have a friend who always does his shopping around supermarket chuck-out time on a Saturday.
He knows, to the minute, what time M&S, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose discount their fresh produce. He goes from one retailer to the next, bagging bargains along the high street. As money-saving methodologies go, it’s very current, as Simon Cowell would say.
