Obviously skiing has it's perils for the averagely anxious, extreme-sports avoiding dullard like me. You stand on plastic planks with sticks to save you from colliding into rocks, bespattering whatever French mountainside you've chosen to overlook for a long weekend whilst sipping Veuve Clicquot with your honking Clapham friends. Not for me, this adventure. Holidays are a means to reduce risk in my head - an opportunity to escape stress-induced heart attacks, mentalists thrusting me into trains at Mile End station and the choleric hand of God battering my kidneys as a guilt-trip reminder to stop treating my body as if it were a poorly organised distillery. So skiing, and bungee jumping in Thailand, and shoplifting in Dubai, and cheating on Millionaire in India... these are not holidays to me.
So, when snow turns up on your door step like a red carpet to an incredible Smeg freezer cabinet that seems to be preserving London for the global warming that will microwave it to oblivion, I'm surprised by how beautiful it is. How bright light captures it and makes Brokesley Street romantic. Cars topped with the stuff like icing on a particularly sugary cake, shoe holes in the ground you can't help but fit your own into, like a kid again.
My housemates made snow men outside. Chris' started out looking like a cock, but eventually became a man, like Jamie Oliver. Kate made a snow otter with soil for eyes, a cross between Bagpuss and Samuel Beckett's unwritten riverside masterpiece. Holly made a snow cat who was shorter than the rest but probably the sexiest of all three.
I walked Kate some of the way home and drifted through Victoria Park, watching the ducks on the lake slip about, confused but attempting to carry on regardless. A swan looked disinterested, like swans and genuinely beautiful people tend to, occasionally squawking contractually. People were smiling, and there were a lot of them about, skiving off work (although, lets be fair, this part of the East End isn't well know for its employed people - either they're fantastically poor and riddled with scurvy or they're funded by payrents whilst selling overpriced cupcakes for their friends on Broadway Market), building ironic snowmen with Starbucks cups in their twiggy hands. A girl took a picture of Kate and I if we took a picture of them. Some oiks threw snowballs quite hard, almost too hard, at complete strangers. If it rained guns, would they be firing? Almost certainly.
But people seemed preternaturally happy. I think we'll take to global warming well once it gets its act together and really starts messing with things.
I came back home to work. I ate soup, a bacon sandwich and five hob nobs. I had three cups of tea. The snow kept falling. My feet stayed cold. To change position, I put my laptop on my lap. It warmed my legs for a bit. But after awhile I began to suspect I was overheating my balls. As I said, snow is dangerous. You shouldn't put too much heat on your balls.
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I'm more than a quarter of the way through Infinite Jest now, page 350 or something. It remains awesome, tiring, clever and stupid at the same time. There's one chapter which has a twelve page footnote, itself footnoted, detailing the political upheavals of a fictional event between the US and Canada. I'm aware I could just skip it, but I have to read it, I'm going to read all of it, no cheating. Every sentence is densely constructed, and you need a dictionary by your side, but frequently there's obscenely brilliant moments - the shallow reasons why video phones gradually morphed back into their original ear-and-mouth incarnations, the New York academic who thinks there are only a finite amount of erections available in the universe at one time and panics that he's denying a Ethiopian farmer his right to tumescence, the deformed details of poor Mario Incandenza, born with a small body and tiny head, his teeth like that of a dolphins.
I think I'll have it finished by April.
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I'm listening to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion a lot. It's great and sounds like pop music from Atlantis.
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