1:27pm Friday 8th January 2010
By Colin Baker
THE Inuit were alleged to have over a hundred words for snow, until it was realised that they didn’t all speak the same language. I have two – ‘Snow’ and another word, or indeed series of words, which I cannot include in this article.
Enough is enough. We are not a country that expects or is geared up for any more than a light occasional dusting of snow. It may well be that the gulf stream’s proximity to our islands has given us ideas above our station (or should that be ‘below our line of latitude’?) for several generations; indeed, it is only as recently as 1895 that we have seen the Thames at Oxford frozen to such a depth that a carnival was held on the ice.
All I can say about this current white-out is that, for the first time in the three decades I have been performing in pantomime, on Tuesday we played to a matinee attended by the 28 people who lived near enough to the theatre to struggle through the icy roads.
Three schools and scores of other groups that had booked were simply unable to get there. This is undoubtedly the smallest number of people in front of whom I have ever strutted my panto stuff, aside from the last dress rehearsal when you are longing for an audience that contains more than the production team who have seen it a dozen times before and feel no need to react any more. To their credit the magnificent Malvern 28 worked even harder than we did to compensate for their lack of company. They clearly felt quite sorry for us and had enough Christmas spirit left over to respond with gusto to every invitation to indicate their loathing of me (I should add here that I am the villain, so booing is okay) or their awareness of who was ‘behind’ whom.
Subsequent performances have sadly been similarly sorely depleted. All of which is somewhat dispiriting, of course, but when I am prevented from getting home on my day off then this snow stuff is really surplus to requirements.
Walking in a Winter Wonderland is okay in songs but when you are trying to get on with your life in a country that is simply not geared up for it, for sound historical reasons that perhaps no longer apply, it is a complete pain!
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