Question

Write 10 points speech on what to do in winter

Answer 1

At some point in October or November you realise you can actually smell the cold. It’s a clean, vivid smell which travels down your airways and straight into your lungs and head, making you feel suddenly alive. There’s something a bit like peppermint or eucalyptus to it, but these are pale imitators of the real thing.



Stodgy food in summer is just wrong. The long, light days compel you to eat light meals; such as steamed fish, or salads with green and red leaves. But winter, when growth is scarce, is the time of decadence and feasting. I love coming home through the dark city, walking under street lights and peeking in the brightly lit windows, knowing that I am about to eat a huge macaroni cheese or a slow cooked goulash with lashings of sour cream on a pile of steaming rice. Winter is also a time of puddings, creamy confections loaded with syrupy sweetness.


I love those mornings when it is properly cold, and you look out from windows on which Jack Frost has drawn his patterns to see the crisp promise of a winter’s day. These days hold a fragile, brittle finiteness that the long days of summer will never possess.



Dressed in summer skirt, tank top and sandals I feel free, but in a knitted dress, my mottled grey black coat and a thick baby blue scarf, I feel innocent, wholesome, sweet. I remember a few years ago a friend had a Cossack hat, akin to the one worn by Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. Her beautiful heart shaped face looked suddenly childlike when she put the hat on. While summer is sexy, a time of coral lipstick and long loose hair, winter is its kid sister, innocent, sweet and dressed for warmth, her gloves sewn to her coat sleeves.



The Christmas market in Edinburgh, where I live, opens in late November, and though this is early, the switching on of lights, for me, symbolises the beginning of the festive season. You might resolve that if hear one more shop playing ‘Santa Baby’ you will walk right out, but Christmas markets have a free pass to play whatever music they want. I can forgive the often-overpriced goods on sale, so bright and inviting are the wooden stands and well-wrapped shopkeepers. There is something heady in the combination of chilliness, the smell of mulling wine and the excited cries of those on the Ferris wheel and ice rink.



I remember carol services as a child at my C of E primary school, walking two abreast in a long snake of kids behind our teacher, each clutching a tin of soup or box of cereal which we would donate to the church. There was a restless excitement to those days. They symbolised the end of term, and a moment of quiet before the afternoon’s Christmas party where we were given jelly and played dressing up and pinning the tail on Mary’s donkey. 

I went to the University of St Andrews, where the carol service was beautiful – the church decorated and scented and filled with whispers. The heavy sense of tradition embraced us, reaching deep into the winter night and staying with us as we poured out to our halls of residence, our flats, or the cosy pubs in to


Winter evenings are for staying in. I love making my bed cosy and climbing into it in flannel pyjamas, with a long gripping novel or a TV series like The Forsyte Saga. Winter makes me crave old-fashioned entertainment, Victorian novels, and period dramas; stories which reflect a time as dark as this cold season.


When I was a child we would listen to Carol and the Advent Calendar every December, a radio play written by my father, telling the story of a little girl who climbs through the windows of her beautiful wooden advent calendar. My father sat in his study with my sister Polly on his knee as he wrote, and she – then six years old – came up with ‘hug and squeeze and issmas’ when asked what rhymed with Christmas. I listen to the radio intermittently in spring and summer, flitting in and out, occasionally finding my attention grabbed, but it is from late October that radio comes into its own. The Afternoon Play on Radio 4 seems made for dreary winter afternoons where all is grey, and rain spatters the window.



In childhood winter was a time of glitter and Pritt Stick; gold and sapphire sequins on a black sheet of card. Now, the glitter of winter has been transposed to clothing. The time taken getting ready for a party lengthens and takes on some fairytale ball magic. Gone is the any-old-thing insouciance of summer, replaced with a potent feeling of adventure.



Scottish Opera bring their annual winter production to Edinburgh every November, offering £10 day tickets to those who queue the morning of the production. For the past four years I have done this, standing from 7am in the biting cold outside the Festival Theatre. Perhaps it is this wait on a dark November morning which makes the opera that night seem all the more special, and the interior of the theatre more grand, with its plush seats and red velvet curtain which shudders slightly before it finally rises, and the orchestra begins to play.