More on Changing Times.

I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I hate winter. I didn’t mind it when I was younger because it brought two benefits in its train: it was the season to play rugby and the season when Christmas happened. But now the playing of my favourite game and my appreciation of Christmas are both the stuff of distant memory, so winter has become the season to be cold and miserable and nothing else.

But here we are at the lightest time of the year, and approaching the warmest, and I’m still not satisfied. The problem now is that I’m growing ever more impatient for the evening light to fall sufficient to justify closing the curtains. It shuts the world out, you see, and the world is something I’m not overly fond of any more. Is that a sign of me being curmudgeonly, a consequence of advancing age, or a simple case of irony?

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I had a strange dream last night in which I flew to Chicago in order to fill some sort of work assignment. I was surprised to note that the air didn’t feel different there than it does here, whereas I’d always thought that the air does feel different when you go to a foreign country. I was lodging in a semi-detached cottage (duplex to Americans, I believe) and there was a ginger cat sitting on the boundary wall next door. It wasn’t friendly.

So why the dream? Why Chicago? Why the familiar air? Why the unfriendly cat?

I wonder whether it was due to the fact that I mentioned Catherine McNabb to Mel last Sunday. Catherine was the attractive and mildly glamorous young woman who was my ‘minder’ when I was sent to Toronto on a photographic assignment for a publisher a long time ago. She was the one who took me to breakfast at a posh restaurant in her black BMW. It was the first time I had ever been offered a choice from a range of teas and the first time I had ever sat in a BMW. (Being from a northern English working class background, I’d always regarded tea as just tea. I opted for English breakfast because I’m a stickler for purity. I imagined the others might have tasted of beef curry or baked fish or something else unimaginably gross. I later discovered a food bar in the shopping mall which sold almond-flavoured coffee. I tried one and it was hideous. I decided that this is what happens when you allow colonials to run amok and experiment.) But Catherine was lovely. She gave me a lift – in her black BMW – to the airport late in the evening of my last day, and threw in a hug for good measure. She’s one of those people I’ll never forget, and my but times do change.