PARAGRAPH: SEVEN

Frost

Sometimes I start to believe that I really don’t understand frost at all, and I’m not talking (for once) about the TV show, although, now that I come to mention it, “A Touch of Frost” is, quite possibly the only TV Detective series that I have never really taken to, but that’s no doubt a thought for another day, and is not really the kind of frost that is on my mind today. Although I obviously am thinking about it, because I’ve mentioned it, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted to write aboutt when I sat down at my keyboard on this frosty morning. Usually, when the weather forecasters are utterly convinced that it’s going to be a cold, cold night these days, I put my nice new windscreen frost protector on the car and when I get up, and the thermometer is telling me that it’s minus six degrees outside I think that this was probably a wise thing to have done. And yet, when  I get to the car I sometimes find out that all of its windows are clear and frost-free. Other days, when it’s “only” minus one and I have to scrape the windows like a mad thing to get even the slightest view of the road ahead as I rattle along it in blind terror of the ice beneath my wheels. Well, not exactly “blind” of course, especially not after all of that scraping and spraying, but you know what I mean. Sometimes I set off with lovely clear windows and I’m barely thirty yards further up the road and the windows have all frosted over again, but the thermometer insists that the temperatures are now approaching the levels of being positively “balmy” (or, at the very least, teetering on the brink of being “positive”). I know about “wind chill” and how merely moving through the chilly air drops the relative temperatures far below what they were when I was being all static, although remaining motionlessness would rather defeat the object of actually getting in the car in the first place. On other days, in the gathering darkness of a winter’s evening, I will sniff the air, look about me and decide that it is indeed likely that a frost will form. Then I will wrap up the car in anticipation and find that I am totally wrong about this notion, usually to be found the following day wafting a soggy plastic sheet about rather pathetically because of the heavy rain. It’s just as well I’ve never claimed to be some sort of soothsayer, or weather forecaster come to think of it, because I’d’ve been hounded out by the villagers with the blazing torches long ago for my ineptitude. On other evenings, the windows will already be steaming up from my mere presence behind the steering wheel. Sometimes, on a raw afternoon, I will return to my car to make the homeward journey only to find that it is already icing up. Everything is predictable and yet nothing is. Occasionally the rain will turn to sleet and even hailstones and, come the morning, the hailstones will have formed into a solid lump of ice that traps the windscreen wipers so solidly that they have to be chipped out and half the rubber remains firmly attached to the glass and another trip to the car parts shop becomes necessary as the wipers scrape across the glass uselessly on a morning when they’re really needed. This will be because I took a look at that evening rain and thought “Nah! No chance of this lot freezing tonight...” and because I didn’t want to be waving that soggy sheet around in the morning or putting a load of wet plastic in the back of the car to start the inevitable rotting of the carpets, I instead foolishly trusted to my dodgy soothsayer instincts, despite the fact that they’re always being proved wrong. However, if I have been clever enough to put the frost protector on, this little matter of the perished rubber will, of course, be prevented, but other frost-related traps may still lie in wait for the unwary driver (and, to be fair, also the wary ones if your circumstances dictate that you have to park outside whatever the weather...) to combat. Ah well, back to scraping those windows, I suppose, but why does it always leave my fingers feeling so very painful as they thaw out afterwards, and I really, really don’t want tro have to start thinking about frozen locks and clambering in through the wrong door to get to the driver’s seat. At my age, such gymnastics are just plain wrong. In the end, I rather suspect that this is a pretty dull bit of writing about something not very interesting, but, I suppose that if it does get a frosty reception, I suppose that, at the very least, will be nothing if not appropriate.