We were all very friendly and helped each other out during the difficult weather. Picture by Jennifer Burton.
THE VIEW FROM HERE
I HAVE every sympathy for those who suffered during the freeze-up, particularly the old, the ill, the abandoned and those for whom the weather will bring much economic hardship.
But those days of unaccustomed iciness have also been also extremely interesting, bring us new perspectives on our lives.
There were lots of laughs, too. Snow is a great leveller and we went for practicality rather than fashion, swaddling ourselves in any number of woolly garments, extraordinary headgear pulled down over our faces, arms stuck out from Michelin-Man layers of padding, legs encased in clumpy socks and stout wellies.
Walking was treacherous and we grabbed anything we could, swinging from lamppost to railing and occasionally ending up on our backsides, like any old drunk on a Saturday night.
Everyone was terrifically friendly, too. As it was impossible to recognise anybody beneath their scarves and mad hats, people burbled at each other through the woolly bits, united over the empty supermarket shelves and comparing horror stories.
No potatoes! An Islandwide egg shortage! What can we panic buy instead? Ooh, it was like the war. Mufflers instead of gas masks but still no bananas.
We all had to stay in a lot, too, and find things to do. There was a meditative serenity to those hours of enforced domesticity and people discovered new pleasures.
One friend of mine, normally the height of sophistication, telephoned to say she was just tottering out to the village shop to see if she could get a crochet magazine she’d seen on the telly.
"Free wool and everything!" she said, as excited as if she’d found a special offer on a Gucci handbag.
It may not be Noah’s Flood but when the Island Freeze is over, we might remember it as turning-point in the way we assess our values. Especially as we admire our hand-crocheted blankets.
We’re so much more than a crumpled-up island of Cyprus
The Island has often been used as a benchmark for statistics and comparisons, some of them a bit dubious.
For years it was believed you could get the entire population of the world on to the IW. I’m not sure that’s true any more, what with bits of it falling into the sea.
In any case, we shall never know. Even if the entire population of the world decided to test the theory, the ferry companies would immediately scupper the experiment by taking advantage of the situation and raising their fares to exorbitant levels far out of the reach of your average family from downtown Timbuctoo.
Yet the Island remains under attack from people out for a cheap laugh. The latest insult comes from a report about Stavros Flatley, the comic dancing duo who featured in last year’s Britain’s Got Talent competition. This father-and-son act, who come from Cyprus and have maps of that island tattooed on their chests, somehow lurched into the final, despite their disgustingly flabby physiques, and since then have been much in demand on the public stage.
All this work has caused them to lose weight and their tattoos to shrivel.
The duo have been ordered to pile on the flab again because (are you ready for this?) "the tattoos were beginning to look like the IW."
Excuse me? What dancing duo would not be proud to have a map of the IW on their chests? Much better than Cyprus, which is a dreadfully volatile place and used to have that tiresome archbishop with the beard (no, not Rowan Williams, the other one) causing us so much trouble.
Let Stavros Flatley eat as much syrup-soaked baklava as they like. After that rudeness, we don’t want them advertising the Island on their horrible chests and we certainly don’t want them coming over here after they’ve got all lardy again.
I believe there’s a statistic which says if you put the entire duo of Stavros Flatley on the IW, everybody else would be jolly squashed.