You can guarantee, while we describing our current spell of chilly weather as ‘Siberian’ or ‘Arctic’ we had never been to either of these places. I know full well that what we seeing is nothing of the kind.
We’ve had a cold snap with temperatures dipping below minus five for a few days at night and the serious snow was all over the country. Lots of things don’t work. The transport in the city and on the hills was breaking down. Everywhere was the true disaster.
And what about a Siberia when the temperature is below about minus 40 °C, life is not really tenable unless you are seriously well equipped. Peripheral things here take on a profound significance when conditions are more Martian than Terrestrial.
If you throw a glass of water into the air it really does fall to the ground as a shower of ice. Your lungs hurt thanks to the sheer effort your body must make keeping their delicate membranes warm enough to not freeze solid with every breath, and just existing requires several thousand calories a day in extra fuel. The old saying here is that words spoken at the end of autumn here are held, frozen, in the air, to be heard once again when the thaw comes in spring.
So let’s hear no more nonsense about our ‘Siberian’ weather, because for the original people of Siberia, it would be only the gentle winter.
