It’s a nice sunny-ish day, mild-ish for the season (8°C right now at 2.35pm), though the mornings are still cold. The climate’s going mad as you might have noticed. Mostly going hotter, but sometimes there are some very cold episodes. Like about a week or two ago. Although, having said that, it wasn’t that cold here compared to say, in Canada, and it wasn’t even very cold compared to some of the winters from my teenage years. I have memories of -15°C in the mid-80s in St Germain/Poissy. The other day we didn’t go below -7°C I think.
Anyway, so what’s this about? Not climate change, there’s enough on the topic on the web, my only take on that is that you don’t have to look very hard to see that the climate is not what it was 40 years ago or so, and that there are more dramatic climate-related events, even in areas that were previously considered temperate. No, I’ll just ramble on as usual about my own perceptions of hot and cold, or rather the extremes of that.
I’ve always lived in mild climates, all my childhood in Bordeaux, to the point that, even if I had seen snow on holidays in the Pyrénées, that day on my last winter in Bordeaux (or one of the last anyway) when we had snow in Bordeaux I went mad running around the house shouting ‘Il neige! Il neige!’ (I might have related this on another page on this site? Quite possibly). I was a happy child then. But it was about the snow, not the cold.
My first confrontation with extreme(-ish, all relative) cold was the winters I mentioned above. Yet, I don’t remember suffering from the cold. In fact the idea of this blog, I think, comes from the events related on some of the mental pages: winter 2001-2002. Cold though not extremely cold, snowy, but mostly the setting for the crisis. And it led me to one of the usual reversals of opinion: what if hell was a frozen place rather than a burning furnace as popular culture would have us believe? So I’ve kept that idea since then. Of course, it’s just an idea, whether you ‘believe’ in hell or not (I’m not sure I do, I really don’t have much of an opinion on that, it doesn’t affect my being or behaviour, humanists ideals guide me I hope, some belief in humanity and the good in it, values I’ve been taught or found, that may or may not be rooted in religion, but are intrinsically not linked to religion), but one worth considering: hell is a very cold dark place.
Lately even here we’ve been more exposed to heatwaves, extremely hot temperature, even reaching the 40°s in Paris, which was unheard of in my youth. I used to consider 30°C or above as very hot, now if it’s under 40°C I think it’s fine. I was exposed to the heat mostly through work trips, having done Dubai in 2006, Qatar in 2014, and then another trip to Abu Dhabi. India and Australia weren’t very hot at the time I went. And when I was over there, I found out that, while I didn’t have a chance to do sports, I enjoyed walking in the extreme heat, it didn’t bother me. Sure, it was mostly dry-ish heat, and humidity is a major factor in feeling differently about hot and cold, but I’ve also occasionally enjoyed doing sports in hot conditions over 30°C in Paris, not a big issue for me.
As for the very cold, well I have played football in the cold many times, and recently, due to my training for that half-marathon, I have certainly run in the cold (though not (yet?) less than -2 or -3°C I think). Sure, you put on many layers and it’s OK, but my hands have been suffering more this year, either getting dry in the cold or getting that frozen sensation at the tip of fingers even when wearing two layers of gloves. White knuckles at times too. Hell, I even got confused about some pain in the foot, blaming it on a reaction of tension to the cold, but that I know suspect was the first sign of a small (for now?) bout of metatarsalgia. The thing is, whether it rained, was cold, or sometimes both, that half-marathon training forces me to face these conditions, and it’s a good thing. But I don’t think I’ve gone running in shit conditions for many years before, as there was no incentive or target. I wouldn’t naturally do it, whereas the heat would not necessarily put me off.
And in general, yeah, when it’s too hot, it’s not very nice. After all, the second crisis – see relevant blog post- did happen in very hot conditions, but whether it’s the different circumstances, or just the fact that the first one came… before, obviously, it didn’t trigger any negative associations with heat waves. The bottom line is probably just that, like with everything in this life, I’m not a big fan of extremes, and extremists. I can face them, I can endure them, but I do not enjoy them or look for them. That’s not saying I’m not prone to excesses, though I try to temper those these days, but there’s a difference between excess and extreme. Excess is just an overload of one trend/emotion/obsession. It doesn’t force anyone else, it doesn’t advocate radicalism. OK. I’m going completely off-piste, but that was a side-thought I had the other day.
Conclusion: given the choice between extreme heat and extreme cold, I would choose extreme heat. Sure, there’s also this idea that heat irremediably destroys (fire burns, etc…), while cold conserves (hibernation, frozen food, etc, it’s a stasis that can be just a momentary stop), but hey I think heat without destruction is possible, and frost can very much kill humans, and also do damage, unfrozen things seem the same but they’re not and often don’t function as well as they used to. Also heat is life, the fire burning inside is what we need to keep us going. And if you’re coming back to religious pronouncements, they said ‘ashes to ashes’, so maybe we come from the fire and will return to the fire.
P.S: oh yes, and I do like the colour red, whether it only comes from the Arsenal or not is debatable. After all, I spent all my time in Poissy in a room with red walls.