Pinter and wind chill

Here’s a link to a photo gallery showing the damage heaped upon Stanley Park, our big downtown park (should that be rainforest?) I’m not fluent in the West Coast vernacular, but the gallery gives a good indication of what happens when the wind shows up with this much gusto.

The latest meteorological wonder is the threat of -16 windchill in the morning. Since I’m not even sure what wind chill is, had to inquire of a person who is familiar with it all up in Yellowknife (she stated it was minus 40 up there at the moment) and then gave an apt description of exactly what one must don in order to make it intact to lunchtime. Essentially you exit the bed and wear the equivilent of a continental quilt head to foot with pertinent holes for the eyes. A sort of arctic burqa look.

It’s one thing looking at these astonishing numbers in other places on the map of this gigantic land of frozen puddles, it’s quite another when the numbers suddenly shift left and threaten the old doorstep. We aren’t equipped. The last time the temp dipped to -4 the Puffin had a fire alarm at school and had to stand outside for twenty minutes with no coat on, because obviously we never have cause to think about such things.

Anyway amidst learning this new dialect of the chills, I did chance upon a most uplifting interview with Harold Pinter  from earlier in the year. Listening to him made me excited about being a writer, or perhaps more significantly about being a human being, which is a fairly rare sentiment. Or perhaps I was also excited about the fact he’s still alive, given he’s nearly died twice. I hope it has the same effect on you if you listen to him. At the end he reads from a recent piece about mobile phones, which is both funny and eerily familiar. I find him to be a very hopeful man, (because of his clarity and his integrity), who filled this listener with a great sense of purpose, rather than my usual bumbling fogginess, amply demonstrated in previous post about wiggly tooth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/review/default.stm