Those Long Winter Nights

The main thing that I don’t miss about an English Winter is not so much the weather, but actually the long nights.  I can take the cold and I actually like snow (as long as it’s fresh and not slushy), but the extended periods of darkness can just be plain depressing.

The problem is that if the daytimes are overcast in England, you can actually spend a week or more when it never seems to get light.  You get up in darkness, go to work in darkness, spend the day indoors looking out at the greyness and then return home in the dark.  The experience of being stuck inside can also be exaggerated by an element of claustrophobia in many cases, given that the size of rooms and houses are generally more modest in England, compared with the USA.

I have long speculated that the darkness contributes to the melancholic streak in the English character.  Just as the US is 2 notches to the right on the political scale, Blighty is 2 notches towards miserableness on the chirpiness meter.

Not everyone in the US lives in Florida, of course.  Some of the northern states have winters much harsher than Northern England, or even Highland Scotland, for that matter.  Some US Northerners, nicknamed ‘Snowbirds’ travel down to Florida for the Winter months in order to avoid the worst of it. 

December in St Augustine, Florida

I do miss having four distinct seasons, though.  In Florida it is (almost too) hot and humid from May to September; sunny and comfortable for Spring (March to April) and Autumn (October to November); with the Winter months being more like October in the UK: cold, but only occasionally freezing.  Actually, that’s not true, the Florida nights can be cold, but the daytimes are often sunnier and warmer than a typical Summer’s day in England.  

Ironically, because the Winter can be so dark and miserable in England, Spring can be a truly joyous time - when, much to everyone’s relief, Nature literally seems to ‘spring’ back to life after lying dormant for what seems like an age.  You don’t get that in Florida.  It just gets gradually hotter (and stickier) from February onwards.

Snow in Headingley, Leeds

I am certainly not moaning.  I can play tennis here all year round here, which is pretty amazing.  The Winter in Florida, if anything, can be better for outdoor sports.  I still remember the singles match I played at the height of Summer, when it was over a 100 degrees F and even the spectators in the shade were dripping with perspiration – it was more like a war of attrition than a sporting contest!

It is also true to say that human cultures always tend to adapt to their situation and make the most of it.  The ‘indoor culture’ in England has no doubt contributed to its wealth of literature, music, and numerous hobbies and pastimes.  There is also no real equivalent in Florida of stumbling up a snow covered hill, entering a pub with a real fire, and supping a foamy pint of warm ale whilst you thaw out.

English Winters can still be depressing though…  



From Sheep to Alligators at Facebook

Parental visit

There comes a time in every expat’s life when he gets a visit from across the ocean from his parents.  My time was this Christmas. 

My wife and I spent most of October, November, and December preparing the house – doing all the various DIY, obscure cleaning, and upgrade jobs that we’d been putting off.

Our place is small, so my mother and her partner stayed at a local hotel.  We picked them up and took them to the hotel on their first day to find that my mother had been made “Guest of the day”, which was a source of amusement for us.

Many of the things that my mother and her partner noticed about North Central Florida, I remembered noticing myself when I first visited several years ago, but they’ve since become my everyday normality, so I barely notice them anymore. They seemed surprised by how neat and tidy everything was.  Parts of Britain do certainly have severe litter problems, although like in  the USA, it can vary quite a bit from from place to place.

My mother and her partner are less flexible than me – although I moan about some things in the US, I am essentially a go-with-the-flow sort who likes to explore things.  When it comes to food, for instance, although I am lukewarm on certain elements of mainstream American eating, I do like many things about the Floridian diet, such as the fresh seafood, as well as Mexican and Cajun dishes (plus Chinese, Indian, Thai, Caribbean, and Italian).  My mother’s partner is much more conservative with his eating habits, however, so we ended up eating at places that served food such as “British Fish and Chips” (which is never quite like the real thing in the USA, anyway), rather than at the places where they serve a more local menu.

In a cafe in St Augustine

All in all the trip was a success, however.  We did start running out of touristy things to do with my parents towards the end, but that was kind of inevitable - Gainesville is essentially a working college town, not a holiday resort, so there are only so many sights to see.  We did manage to find some alligators for them to photograph, however, and take them on day trips to both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, including a visit to America’s oldest continuously occupied settlement, St Augustine.