you’ll find me stamping my feet on the littoral lino of the ice rink. My kid takes lessons there, but I can’t get into skating myself, my feet start to twitch and ache as I approach the building. I remember a Clark Gable movie – China Seas – with river pirates clamping and tightening the Malay Boot to one of Gable’s dogs until he gave up the treasure – that’s how I feel in skates. Shunning the ice, I skulked and shuffled about the rink. Even with these exertions, a chill soon sets into your bones if you’re not scooting about on the freeze. I cast about for something positive to emerge from this suffering and only stumbled across it when I carried a copy of Dan Simmons’ The Terror along with me. Climate reading. With my teeth a-chatter, throat tightening as the glands swell and a hoar frost fanning out from my eyebrows, I was soon lost in the bergs with the white beast and Captain Crozier. There was a definite immersive increase, with my nose glowing blue and the loss of sensation in my fingertips. So, I’ve switched my reading to polar or wintry settings. In the Land of White Death, Kolyma Tales, Clark’s Barbarossa and Jack London with his last-match-in-a-snowstorm stories have joined my ice library. The cold gives them urgency. Reading doesn’t have to be the fireside chair and the velvet pouf, perhaps we readers should inhabit the text? My grandfather lived alone for a while in his black-brick Victorian manor. He liked to unlock the house and read murder mysteries in the basement, with his chair turned away from an open door and only a small glass of Black Label as a salve against the night.
