A COLD COMING

A Christmas Memory From Before Climate Change

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."

T.S. Eliot, The Journey of the Magi

Frame from original 1925 screen version of Ben-Hur, the Nativity scenes were filmed in a primitive form of Technicolor

A cold coming I had of it:

December 1970, a year abroad, end of Michaelmas term and obligated to vacate my room at Harris Manchester College, Oxford (as minor as a minor college can be, surviving on fees charged to American students). So in serious winter I couch surfed around London before a planned meeting in Brussels with my best friend from Antioch who was doing his year abroad at the Karolinska Institute in Prague.

And it was really cold.

Last month, marked 40 years since I left the US for Britain and what has turned out to be forever. At the time I thought I would mark the occasion with an essay about changes in the country to which I ex-patriated myself, and my own metamorphosis into a dual citizen’s identity. But in fact I was in the US last month and found retrospective insights on my ex-patriate life in short supply. The American Crisis, its slide to calamity, has overwhelmed my sense of being of two countries. I am a Yank permanently abroad, but still a Yank.

But for some reason, memories of that month of December 1970 have been floating around my brain as I went around London the last week and have crystallized into the anniversary reflection I failed to write on the occasion.

December 1970 was when the seed for a life in England was planted. A winter crop, that took years to come to harvest, that’s how I came to live more than half my time on earth in London.

The trigger for the reverie has been the weather. The weather in London these past Christmases are meh of a meh-ness: temperatures in the mid-40s to low-50s for weeks before the holiday, slate skies, and no prospect of snow, the leavening for the soul in the darkest days of the year.

And so I remember the cold in 1970. And it was in fact colder than we are used to today. A quick trip to google to ask what the weather was like in Britain in December 1970 brings the answer that it was cold, very cold, and it snowed before and on Christmas.

London Christmas 1970, source unknown

And the memory of weather — confirmed as accurate — leads on to another: a sense of being happy. This is an unusual feeling for me which is why I remember it. I suffer from Ashkenazic anhedonia. This variation on the DSM-listed condition is not characterized by lassitude or other major indicators of depression. Ashkenazic anhedonics can erupt with joy but there is a hard cap on this feeling, a trip switch that several millennia of eliminationist violence has genetically encoded: a genocidal memento mori which reminds a sufferer don’t get too happy because tomorrow will be worse than today.

The happiness of that December had arrived after a difficult period of time. The Kent State massacre had been 7 months earlier and the deeper meaning of the National Guard shooting to death four university students was still burrowing its way into our subconscious.

Then there were drugs. The cumulative effect of bad homemade amphetamine and a hallucinogen whipped up by a chemistry major I was sharing a house with in the Ohio countryside had triggered something close to a mental and physical collapse shortly after I arrived in Europe.

But during the course of Michaelmas term things began to get better. Oxford was a place where words — my talent, my weapon — were understood. Ironic, allusive, words tumbling in clever cascades, fast, very fast. This ability was valued in that environment.

Other things fed into a sense that this was where I belonged. I was cast in an OUDS production out of fresher’s auditions — not something an American could expect — but the part wasn’t all that big so I joined the university lacrosse team and became a starter. Guys, blokes, banter, communal baths after the match with a serious booze-up to follow.

I’m in this pic

And by the end of term I was healthy, happy, confident. And then met a woman in London. You knew that would be part of the story, right? Late adolescent happiness is almost always tied to regular sexual fulfilment.

We met at a party on Highbury Quadrant not far from the Arsenal Stadium. Flirted, got a bit tipsy, fell onto the bed where everyone had flung their coats, made out and had nowhere to go. Made arrangements to meet the next day. A slightly older friend, Margaret, was going away for a few days, offered me her place, a basement flat around the corner from Harrods, to consummate the situation.

And this is why the memory of colder Decembers triggers this story. Having sex, regular sex, for the first time in my life, in the country which started the industrial revolution but had yet to figure out how to centrally heat its houses. Frozen sex was an experience.

At Margaret’s we built a fire and then put the hot embers into an antique bed-warmer before stripping off partially and making love. Miraculously the warmer didn’t set the bed on fire but only warmed up a circle more or less where our hips were joined. It was just about tolerable but then Margaret came back and we had to carry on elsewhere.

At the place on Redcliffe Gardens where I was crashing and at hers somewhere in Herne Hill the only heat source was a three bar electric fire. The logistics of fucking in rooms where the temperature was not much different than the temperature outside, wind driving cold through window casements and brick work badly in need of re-pointing, was difficult.

This is only 2 bars but you get the idea

Three-bar electric fires are almost impossible to really make work properly. Your relationship to it is very much like the earth’s relationship to the sun. Life is impossible except at the precisely correct distance. Get to close and you burn yourself, even a step too far back and you freeze.

It was even more complicated prone and rolling around on a beaten up second-hand concave student mattress. If you pulled the apparatus too close you could ignite the 100% polyester bedding we screwed on but push it too far away for safety’s sake and all the benefit you derived from it was an orange glow casting strange shadows into the room.

Our youthful exertions generated insufficient body heat to allow for throwing off covers. No post-coital flush of warmth, there was only mottled goose-flesh instead. No drifting off in a melting embrace, instead a clinging for survival to the diminishing warmth of another body. Long internal monologues about whether you really need to get out from under the covers for a pee, because you could freeze to death in the loo or on the way back from it. In the morning icicles on the inside of the window put a damper on a little wake-up sex.

We saw each other regularly in that freezing month but didn’t always spend the night together. She had roommates and I was mostly on someone’s sofa. Those nights we sat on a bench making out in the great barn of Victoria Station waiting for her to get on the last train to Herne Hill.

Then she went back to her family in Malvern just before Christmas and I was alone in London with my growing, unaccustomed feeling of happiness. The weather got colder, you could smell snow in the air. Walking along Old Brompton Road near the Boltons it arrived in strong flurries and I started to jog through the tickling flakes laughing, overcome with the feeling that life would turn out OK. The snow grew heavier and heavier. This is what happiness felt like at the age of 20, the sense that the worst is over.

“There will be days and days and days like this.”

Of course, Ashkenazic Anhedonia inevitably kicked in. Or maybe immaturity. Anyway, I made mistakes and an endless procession of happy days never materialized. I might have stayed on in England after that academic year. There were steps available to me to matriculate at Oxford and take a degree there but I didn’t follow up.

After Christmas I stopped seeing the woman for no particular reason beyond a certainty there would be other lovers in the endless days of happiness and I know that hurt her. I still remember her name but won’t write it here, social media is a dangerous thing and you don’t know who might see this. As for the other lovers … it would be years before they actually materialized.

I went back to America, Life went on. There were occasional joys. One of them was finally having sex for lustful reasons in warm conditions rather than for survival clinging to another body for warmth. But there was never an instant as magical as that giddy surge through snow flurries on the Old Brompton Road.

It would be 15 years, before the crop planted at Christmas 1970 could be harvested. Chance and love gave me an opportunity to return. Forty years ago. I have spent most of that time living a 10 minute walk from the place on Highbury Quadrant where I tumbled onto the coats with that young woman.

I have been wrong often in my life but not about this country being a place where the way I use words — my gift, my weapon, and also my curse — would be appreciated. I could make a living from them here, in London, in a way I had never been able to in New York.

My daughter, who knows most of this story (except the frozen sex bit), once asked me why I didn’t stay on at Oxford back then. I tell her,

Sweetie it’s a good thing I didn’t. I’d be even more insufferably arrogant than I am already.

And then I remind her, “If I had stayed I would never have met your mother.” I don’t have to finish the thought,”If I hadn’t met your mother there would be no you.”

And so I understand why these memories have crowded round this last week.

There are many blessings in having children, mainlining their joy at Christmas is one, but also important is that their existence puts a hard stop on useless “what if” second guessing about your life.

Every wrong path you took, every path you didn’t take but should have, is not worth maundering about. The fact of your child redeems those errors. You are living the life you were supposed to lead, in the place you were meant to live it.

Not just at Christmas but every day:

All roads lead to the child.