Ewe and two lambs

A spirited spring face

Female hazel flower, magnified; in the foreground, the much more visible male catkin

Hazel male flowers: ‘lambs’ tails’ or catkins

Goat willow (‘pussy willow’) hedgerow

Way ahead of time, tucked in a sunny spot on a bank: primrose

Like most writers, I abhor clichés, but one cliché that makes me glad each year is the certainty of the English spring, in all its sweet naffness: little lambs gambolling, pale flowers bursting into bloom, pussy willows, forced rhubarb and chocolate cream eggs jazzing up the fare in the supermarkets… and all of the 101 other things that mean that winter is being pushed off into exile. And, if I hadn’t realised this before, last year’s spring (which, if you remember, didn’t happen) left me mourning for an annual cliché that was then even more powerfully etched into our minds by its absence.
When I was young, I didn’t mind heading into the winter: autumn meant pristine new school exercise books or, some years later, the excitement of a new university year; it meant going home in the slightly scary darkness; it meant that the ice cream van that had stood at the end of the street on long summer Sundays had been replaced by the toffee apple man’s van (he who vigorously summoned the children of the neighbourhood by ringing an old school bell out of his window); it meant chestnuts and hot toast and Heinz vegetable soup. But that kind of cosiness and the underlying slightly edgy sense of the danger that might be lurking in the dark (and would, perhaps, grasp you in its claws if you were sent up to Mrs Dack’s shop for some milk after the 6 p.m. news) has long since been replaced for me by the dreary feeling of unwell-being that winter brings: of snivels and snuffles, mornings that are wet and foggy rather than icy and bright and, in the part of the world where I now live, mud, mud and more mud.
I think that much of the problem lies in the fact that we English don’t ‘do’ winter well. Go further South in Europe and the Italians and Spanish celebrate short sharp winters that include coping with heroic bursts of snow before getting back to the norm of a balmy spring-to-autumn of sunshine that lasts for eight months of the year. Go North, and you find Germans, Scandinavians and Russians revelling in the winter, showing off their prowess on skis and skates, sometimes with a great deal of bravado. (A few years ago, I had a Finnish client (day-job) who boasted that he always skied in T-shirt and shorts.)
Perhaps the only country that is as bad at wintering as we are (or worse!) is France, but the French people that I know seem to solve the problem by going into virtual hibernation: The weather is foul – they stay at home – and eat and drink, mon brave, and sulk until the spring appears. Then there are the Scots, whose winters are colder and gloomier than ours and who succeed in behaving in a correspondingly chill and more lugubrious way. However, there is a grandeur about their melancholy: it is a Carlylean gloom of grandiose proportions, not to be compared with the trivial gnat-like whining about the weather in which we English indulge. And, like the French, the Scots understand that the only way to get through the winter is by eating the appropriate food and taking a wee dram whenever the opportunity presents itself. I endured three Scottish winters when I was working in Dumfries (home of the deep-fried Mars Bar, though even Dumfries folk regard this delicacy as an extreme remedy, to be used only at times of urgent necessity) and I have to admit that getting through day after day on six hours of daylight was not easy. At the place where I worked, we were supported through the winter months by the culinary achievements of our two stalwart canteen ladies. Menu favourites were meat and tatties, beefsteak suet pudding and haggis or hash with chips. If we asked for something light, they served up lasagne. I once suggested that a winter salad would make a nice change and they nearly fainted. ‘Salad? In the winter? How will you get the energy to do your work, hen? How will you keep warm while you’re working?’ (Of our workforce of 160, half a dozen worked in the packing bay; the rest of us were seated at desks, with the heating turned up a good 5 degrees higher than was strictly necessary.) Yet perhaps they had the right idea: we were trapped in the catastrophe of winter, and they were battling with it on our behalf.
So I say again that the English are the most hopeless of all nations when it comes to winter. But we are good at spring, and especially at perpetuating the clichés that go with it. Tomorrow is the first of March: not officially spring yet, therefore, but good enough for me! And I invite you to celebrate it with me in whatever joyful, hackneyed way you wish.
[Being as usual snowed under (a winter metaphor indeed!) with work, I asked my husband to take some clichéd photos to go with this post, but, with his usual delicate touch when behind a camera, he has instead, I think you’ll agree, managed to capture some extraordinarily un-clichéd pictures from what would otherwise have been very commonplace spring-time situations.]

• Carlyle Dumbries spring winter