Suzanne Harrington: We survived the snow — meanwhile, my child is sleeping with snakes and scorpions

A broken heater, snow gridlock, and a partner contemplating Dorito rations—surviving winter’s polar vortex is no small feat, but it comes with its moments of wonder

Irish Examiner journalist, Suzanne Harrington at home in Brighton. Pic: Andrew Dunsmore

By the time you read this it might be mild drizzle again, but at the time of writing we are in the midst of an Arctic polar vortex snow bomb event – or ‘winter’ – and my heater has chosen this precise moment to make a small, sad popping sound before falling dead at my feet like Ginger, the overworked horse in Black Beauty. 

Gamely, I put on fingerless gloves and keep typing.

As I tap-tap-tap this column, my partner is calling with updates every fifteen minutes. 

He is trapped in his car less than a kilometre up the hill from my house, after a light fall of snow has resulted in everyone forgetting how to drive and sitting in icy gridlock. 

Abandon your car and walk the last bit, I suggest, as the snow silently swirls and darkness falls. 

On the hill outside my house, it has reclaimed the landscape, blanketing the fields, the only illumination a snake of unmoving red brake lights.

But being a native of inner London, my partner’s concept of weather is checking it on an app; his idea of the outdoors is going to watch West Ham at home. 

He associates the elements with those things inside kettles, and owns neither wellies not waterproofs. 

Worried messages continuing pinging to my phone about how he may have to drink melted snow to survive, or cannibalise the driver in the car in front when he runs out of Doritos. 

I make a mental note to give him a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

To keep his spirits up, I send him links to the story of the Japanese civil servant who survived three weeks lost in a mountain forest without food or water by going into involuntary hibernation mode, his body temperature dropping to 22 degrees. 

And the Canadian toddler who wandered out into a sub-zero night and froze solid like a bag of peas; her core temperature dropped to 16 degrees and for two hours her heart stopped beating – before she was found, defrosted, and made a full recovery.

In the end I trudge up the hill to meet him, overcome with the joy of snow, because I’m not driving an ambulance or stuck on a motorway with toddlers. 

I am not a fox, or a sheep, or any other creature facing the night outdoors – having made an emergency dash to Lidl earlier for firelighters and HobNobs as the snow started falling but when people still remembered how to operate their vehicles, I have the luxury of enjoying it. 

Of standing in the garden feeling the freezing flakes on my face and going ‘oooooh’, of taking photos to send my child, camping in the bush in 40 degree Australian heat. 

I try to imagine the heat, but can't. The body has no imagination.

Later, wrapped in fluffy blankets in front of the fire, my partner is triumphant as we Facetime my child, who, 17,000km away, is shaking out her sleeping bag for snakes and scorpions. 

I survived, he shouts into the phone. I’m alive!