These days, standing in a puddle doesn’t just mean soggy socks. It also means a crunching sound, evocative of what happens when one grips an egg with a bit too much zeal.
The puddles are icy, as if some absurd trickster had decided that it might be cool to lay thin glass over each one. There is a remarkable level of satisfaction to be gained from standing on the glass-like transparent gatherings of water, although I am not sure why.
It’s even more satisfying to stand on a frozen puddle and not have it crumble beneath your feet. “I haven’t eaten too many doughnuts after all,” one can proclaim triumphantly. Before slipping over and having a heart attack.
Still, it’s a bit horrid. When you’re not trying desperately to squeeze some fun out of the ice, you’re feeling annoyed about the horrid dampness, and waggling your glove-clad fingers about in a bit to not develop frostbite. (Frostbite not being when David Frost gets so frustrated that he sinks his teeth into you, vampire-like, but when your hands get so cold that the fingers drop off to be replaced by icicles. It’s how they make fish fingers – they put Michael Fish in a refrigerator.)
This morning, though, it was different. As I woke up and open my eyes, I had to cover them with my hands in order to stop the rays of laser-like light from blinding me. I don’t really like dogs, you see – they poo all over the place, which I find a bit of a turn-off – so having a deficiency of the ability to discern visuals would be a bit annoying.
I was able to enjoy my cornflakes whilst reclining in a deck-chair made of truffles stuck together with bull sperm. It was terrific – I was out in the sandy beach that used to be my back garden. Then, instead of toast, I tucked into a flambéed albatross with pineapple chunks, wrapped in the leaf of a palm tree.
This global warming malarkey, it’s brilliant.
Actually, I am lying. It was rubbish, as ever. Fellow inhabitants of the United Kingdom were likely growing furious and jealous as they read my description, and they can relax now in the knowledge that, in fact, the weather here is just as depressing as it is all over the place. I’m a little bit jealous of the Australian people, to be honest, although at least I’m not a pile of ash. And I know that pomme means apple.
Maybe it was nice this morning. I was asleep after all – perhaps nobody bothered to tell me about the brief burst of uncharacteristically nice weather, for fear of making me annoyed to have missed out.
Really, though, I doubt that. They know that I’m a lovely person, and in such a circumstance I would be delighted on behalf of those who had the lack of laziness to clamber out of their holes. I would not dream of even entertaining the notion that furiously crying, “why didn’t you wake me up?” might be a plausible idea.
Yeah, right.