the bleak midwinter

Winter at last. The first morning that we woke up to snow last week, One of Two said, ‘You always said we’d take the bikes to school in the snow, daddy. Can we?’

It was true. Back in September, when we were happily bike riding to school in nothing but t-shirts and shorts, I used to quip that we’d do this all year, even in winter, even in ten inches of snow. It was another sad case of feeble dad humour. As winter has mildly progressed, bike riding to school has been sporadic. A day here or there, followed by juvenile whining and a renewed moratorium on getting to school by way of exercise.

So last Wednesday we awoke to a light covering of snow, and One of Two made her out-of-the-blue request. ‘Wee man,’ I said to Two of Two, ‘you up for it?’ ‘Yep,’ he said, and that was that. Decision taken. By two young fools and an idiot. They were, I’m sure, imagining riding through light snow on a beautiful morning under picture perfect blue skies. Me? I just plain wasn’t thinking. Morning autopilot. We togged up – and here I didn’t think to put them in snow trousers, there was only one hat between the two of them, and they were wearing thin woollen gloves – and headed out into the blizzard.

Headed out into the blizzard. There’s a bit of a clue there for even the least perceptive parent…

The prevailing wind on the road to school is at our backs, so I reckoned on an ok trip, despite the cold. A hundred yards along the road One of Two made the first intimation that all was not well. ‘I hate this, dad,’ she said, ‘can we take the car?’ If there is a point of no return on the morning trip to school, this was at least a mile before it. This was the ideal point of return. This was the antonym of point of no return. A huge placard was being held aloft by three angels clad in white and singing softly. ‘The Point Of Return,’ it read. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’ll be fine.’ We rode on.

At the bottom of the long slow hill, and before we’d turned onto the long stretch of straight road that makes up the bulk of the journey, Two of Two tossed his bike into a snowdrift, and the pair of them downed tools and refused to go any further. ‘Well, sports fans,’ I said, ‘if we go back, you have to struggle back up that hill in a blizzard. Or we can keep going, turn the corner, we’ll have the wind at our backs and we’ll be there in no time.’ It was classic, 1916-esque, let’s send three hundred thousand troops into a quagmire to get gunned down and we’ll be in Berlin in time for tea and buns. Pip, pip! Clearly it’s no coincidence that General Haig and I share the same first name.

We turned the corner and met the full force of the blizzard head on. Prevailing wind my bloody arse! cried the spawn in desperation. One of them, can’t remember which, rode on determinedly into it and the die was cast. The next mile and a half took a long time. They were both freezing and miserable, they would take it in turns to have little indomitable bursts, forge ahead into the cold, before collapsing in a wailing heap because they were dying. Meanwhile, the other would be stopped still on the pavement, demanding that I abandon them at the side of the road to go back and get the car.

The previous night TPCKAM had read a page or two of Ray Mears to me, in particular the section on how easy it is to die of hypothermia. So there we were, stuck half way to school, unable to go back, too miserable to go ahead, the kids improperly dressed and glacial, and me feeling like the Useless Moron Dad From The Planet Muppet, on the verge of killing his kids.

There was no flash of lightning, no saviour stopped at the side of the road. The kids saved the day. They cried a bit, but in the end they accepted that there was nothing else for it but knuckling down and getting on with it, which they did. They broke the back of the trip, turned the corner at the end and the last few hundred yards they were chipper and upbeat and had a sense of achievement which they wouldn’t have had with sitting in a warm car, stuck in traffic for twenty minutes. The last five minutes of the trip they were cracking jokes about wanting us all to ride home and get the car. In the end we were so late arriving at school that there weren’t too many of the gigantic-4x4-driving diminutive mum brigade there to see us three hardy and foolish souls finally cross the finish line. But we’d made it, humour and health intact.

Kids dispatched, I turned round and rode home. As I struggled along, riding once again, somehow, into the teeth of the blizzard, a man stopped in his car to take a picture of me on his cell phone. Bloody paparrazi. They get everywhere. Although, it might just have been because I was wearing shorts.