british winter time
it's the most wonderful time of the year (if you've got the right gear)
At the beginning of my third month living in Leipzig, I ordered myself a pair of Hobbs boots. They were expensive, but the novelty of a monthly pay check hadn’t worn off yet, and I was enjoying this strange new existence as a working woman - especially one whose rent, before Leipzig got trendy, was three hundred euros a month. The boots didn’t seem particularly frivolous, is what I’m saying. They were a perfect pair of neat little chelsea boots, chocolate brown and satisfyingly shiny. I wore them to the office the day after they arrived, and the stylish woman who ran brand partnerships came up to me to tell me how much she loved them.
“Thanks!” I said, in my best German. “They’re new - for winter!”
People turned around and looked at me, amused and almost sympathetic.
“For winter? Oh, Ella, those aren’t going to be enough for winter.”
That was early October, and by the time my family arrived a few weeks later for half term, the temperatures had dropped to single digits. In November, a bitter breeze set in, and December disappeared into a dark fug of thick, foggy cold. When I returned in the first week of January, it got down to minus nineteen, and I still remember the burning feeling in my lungs as I walked the few minutes home from the tram on that first freezing night. None of this was normal for Leipzig, my colleagues kept telling me - and it certainly wasn’t normal for me.
But the boots incident had sparked something, a new idea which, somehow, really hadn’t occurred to me in my twenty years of English winters. Maybe normal winter clothes - wellies, a bum-length polyester coat from H&M, whichever hat and scarf combination Accessorize were pushing that year - weren’t enough. Maybe we’d all just been doing winter wrong.
I copied my German colleagues, shyly at first and then more deliberately. I bought fleece-lined rubber boots with grippy soles and drawstring tops; thermal vests and long-johns; woollen socks and different kinds of mittens. I splashed into my savings for the most expensive coat I’ll ever own, a Swiss brand which hangs down below my knees and zips up to my cheeks, with a hood so pronounced it cuts my peripheral vision in half. Wearing it feels like wrapping myself in several sleeping bags, and ten years later, it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever bought.
And then: I loved that winter, even though the days were short and it barely got above zero. Even in the depths of year abroad anxiety (boring, I’ll say no more here), there was a kind of cosy magic to midwinter in Saxony. It wasn’t just the revelation that, actually, proper winter clothes could keep you warm, but it was the way that being warm meant you could enjoy everything else: glowing paper stars hanging in dark windows; a hot drink in a cafe; the way clouds light up when the sun stays low in the sky; the crackling of snow and ice underfoot; the euphoria of a crisp, blue-skied day after many grey ones. It would be a few years before I learned the word ‘hygge’, and even more before I learned the Scandi mantra ‘there’s no bad weather, only bad clothes’, but in that unseasonably cold winter in East Germany, I started to realise this might just be my season. I love winter most for its crisp, bright, freezing days - when you can see your breath; when the puddles have frozen, and the ice is glittering - but increasingly I also love the days where it barely gets light, or dry.
The Germans do winter well but the Scandis do it better: you have to, if you’re going to make it through months of little to no daylight and emerge the other side. Getting to know Sweden and Norway made me realise how many things are lacking from British winters which could turn them from something to tolerate from something to embrace, from the practical (double and triple glazing; big, generous central heating; genuine commitment to housing policy which means nobody is on the streets) to the joyful. I’ve often wondered whether the UK would do winter better if it were just a tiny bit further north; if just slightly colder temperatures and slightly more snow would stop us treating winter like something that might just go away if we complain about it enough.
I actively look forward to the clocks changing - and not just because of the extra hour in bed. And while we can’t count on some of the things that make Scandi winters so magical - the northern lights, thick fluffy snow, skiing to work - I think we can learn from the Germans, who would never wear ordinary boots in midwinter, however stylish they look.
Lessons from Germany: ten things to do to embrace winter (from a self-proclaimed winter lover)
