HERE COMES THE SUN (?)

The other day, when we were on our way home from work, we saw something we hadn't seen for quite some time. Perhaps I should explain here that when we are on our way home from work it hasn't really been possible to see anything for months now, because it's usually darker than Satan's armpit, but the days are getting palpably longer now and there is some lingering visibility. What we saw was a patch, a foot or so across, of grass. Scruffy, more brown than green, and generally looking as if it had gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson in angry mode, but still grass. After a good six weeks of nothing but increasingly discoloured and manky snow and ice, it was a truly wonderful sight.

It has, it's fair to say, been a hard winter here. And let's get this straight, what counts as a hard winter in Moravia is a tad different from the UK version. Not so long ago we were on a station platform in the south of England and the train was late. That's nothing new, but the excuse given for it was. Not leaves on the line, not the wrong kind of snow, nothing like that. It was 'extreme weather conditions'. The temperature was around zero - zero Celsius, that is - and there was no ice, snow, or anything like that. We were gobsmacked. Here, if it gets down to below minus twenty - and it does, on occasion - then maybe the train might be a bit later than it usually is anyway.But otherwise, life would go on pretty much as normal.

I realise that the climate in Britain is balmy compared to here (well, at least till the Gulf Stream packs up and it turns into a kind of offshore Antarctica), and, given the rarity of snow there, I can understand why the place grinds to a halt as soon as there's a light dusting of the stuff, but what I really can't get my head around is the lurid language they use to describe winter weather.

The other night I was watching an episode of 'Steptoe and Son' in which the two of them are huddled round a feeble electric fire and trying, not very successfully, to keep warm. At one point the son, Harold, says "It's like the Eastern Front in here." Like the Eastern Front? Reduced to eating your comrades if you can't get your hands on a transport horse that starved to death? Force-marched thousands of kilometres to the Gulag after your boots have been liberated by your captors and still glad to be out of it?

But of course 'Steptoe and Son' is a comedy, where hyperbole is a good way of raising a laugh. But on the weather forecast, where you might expect to find something a bit more moderate, a bit more sober, it's not so very different. But no, it's 'Arctic' and 'Siberian' as soon as the mercury sneaks down towards the zero mark. But it doesn't just get a bit chilly in those places; they are seriously cold; when it's 'only' minus twenty the local wannabe tough guys probably walk round in the kind of outfits that make Geordies dressed for a Saturday night out look the way the Taliban like their women to look.

Here a more measured approach prevails, but I have noticed more than a few of my Czech friends starting to complain about the length of the winter. They, too, have their patches of grass, no doubt.

Of course, what this means in practice is that any time now the whole place is going to turn into a foul and glutinous quagmire, with treacherous puddles in every street, puckish motorists splashing their contents all over pedestrians, and all the dogshit and other crap that has been buried under the snow and ice coming to the surface, but right now even that feels like a welcome change. I'm sick of winter. Even if it isn't Arctic.