My speed slowed from 15 mph to 10 mph to 5 mph and then to nothing. Visibility out of the front windscreen was so bad I don’t think I even noticed I wasn’t actually moving for the first couple of minutes.
My wheels were turning, but I wasn’t going anywhere.
I looked out of the side window.
The snow was up to the bottom of my door.
For a few moments my brain refused to comprehend what my eyes were seeing.
Without even thinking, I turned to Lucky and said, ‘What the hell? How has this just happened? What has happened? Jesus, where has all this snow come from? I mean … what?’
Then I stopped. Lucky was asleep. He opened his eyes, yawned, and looked as if to say, ‘I am a dog. What do you want from me?’ And then he went back to sleep.
It was the most I had spoken since I was at the BBC and it felt strange. Our normal conversation only went as far as, ‘Here, Lucky’, ‘No, Lucky’, and the old classic, ‘We’re leaving’.
I cleared my throat and tried again.
‘I think we could be in a bit of trouble.’
Lucky didn’t even bother to look up this time.
I turned the engine off and sat for a moment.
The snow was still falling thick and fast, and silently burying us.
We were on a high road with embankments falling away on either side. I peered out of the window to try to see what was beyond the road, but the snow obscured the view after six feet.
I opened the door and got out of the Defender and immediately regretted it. The snow was nearly up to my thigh. The wind blew snow in my face and without a coat on I was shaking with cold before I had shut the Defender door. But I was out now, so thought I’d better make the most of it. I waded to the edge of the road. It was like walking through freezing cold sand; at first it gave easily but, as the flakes gathered together, they formed a casing around me and I had to drag my legs as though I was wearing huge snow trousers.
I could see no more from the edge of the road than from inside the car, and when I turned back, I couldn’t see the car any more and the channel I had made wading through the snow was filling up fast.
I struggled back to be greeted by Lucky’s face pushed against the window. I opened the door and just had time to yell, ‘Noooo!’ into the wind before he launched himself out of the car and into my arms, pushing me back into three feet of snow and burying me in a cold, white icy death. I tried to shout at him again, but my mouth filled with snow and I had a brief, terrifying moment of thinking I would drown. But then he was off me and I was up and coughing and shaking and freezing. I turned to see that Lucky had almost fully disappeared into the snowdrift, so I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him back into the car.
I scrambled in after him and shut the door.
I sat in the driver’s seat and shivered and gasped for breath. I was covered in snow, soaked to the skin, and frozen.
So frozen that, for a moment, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to move.
I was in full panic mode: mind blank, breathing difficult, heart racing.
And that’s what saved me.
I panicked.
My heart raced and my temperature rose.
It didn’t warm me completely, but it gave me enough impetus to turn the engine on and put the heaters up to full blast.
Five minutes later the car was warm and stank of wet dog.
I stripped off my wet clothes and wrapped myself in the sleeping bag that Lucky had been lying on.
I was confounded by the enormity of the problems I now faced. I needed to find dry clothes, but I hadn’t bothered to keep any kind of system in the Defender and had just thrown things into the back when I was done with them. I wasn’t even sure that I had any more clothes; I had been wearing the same ones (including underwear) for the last three days, and had left my previous clothes on whatever motel floor I had last dropped them onto.
I knew that my original Go Outdoors stash had included thermals and ski-wear, but couldn’t remember if I still had them in the back. I needed food and drink in case we were really, really stuck, but again I couldn’t remember how much was left. I needed to get the diesel in case the engine died. I needed to find a way of getting the car out of the snowdrift and then I needed to find a way of driving through three feet of snow.
I also needed a wee.
I couldn’t hold onto a single one of these thoughts for more than a few seconds. My brain was clouded by a fog of fear and Tramadol.
But, as the engine warmed the car and my body temperature returned to normal, my fear subsided and I realised I was mentally and physically drained. Exhaustion washed over me in a heavy wave.
I needed to sleep. Once I had slept I would be able to think straight and work out a way to escape.
Through the haze and the blanket of impending sleep I tried to grasp the vague thread of an urgent thought that flitted across my brain; something about getting dressed and warm in case the engine failed. But, I was currently cosy, sleepy and content. When Lucky wriggled across the seat and laid his stinking damp head on my lap his reassuring warmth tipped the balance and, panic attack averted once more, I drifted off happily into the darkness.
January 25th 2024
I woke suddenly, roused by Lucky’s barking.
For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was and then I couldn’t see where I was. The Defender had been plunged into darkness.
The engine was off and there was a strong smell of urine, which I feared I had provided.
It was cold.
I was cold.
I was really, really cold.
I knew I had to move fast before I got too frozen to do anything again, so I pushed through the seats into the back of the Defender and was immediately plunged into a pitch-black hell of sharp-edged boxes, falling tin cans, sloshing diesel canisters and non-descript plastic bags that could contain either useless pillows or essential thermals.
I should have worked my way around systematically, but instead threw things about like a mad woman. I grabbed anything vaguely soft and ripped into it, throwing anything that resembled clothing into the front seat at a still-barking Lucky. I threw potential food and water after the clothing, causing Lucky to retreat to the footwell. I narrowly avoided throwing a canister of diesel into the front when I mistook it for water.
Soon the front of the Defender was covered in a mountain of rubbish and I was starting to shake with cold. I ripped off my wet knickers and threw them to the back, climbed onto the front seat and laughed with glee to see that I had managed to find both thermal underwear and some puffy skiing trousers. I hadn’t found a coat, so settled for layering three thermal tops and two jumpers. To finish off the outfit I put on two hats, a scarf, and some gloves.
I was so big I could hardly fit behind the wheel any more, but I was warm, so I was happy.
Lucky was still barking.
I coaxed him back up onto the seat and offered him a biscuit, but still he barked and whined, looking out of the windows.
‘It’s just night-time,’ I scolded him. ‘It’ll get light soon, stop being silly.’
But then I looked out of the windows properly for the first time since waking.
The light wasn’t right. It wasn’t the pitch black of night, there were no snowflakes falling from the sky and no stars twinkling above me. It was a weird greyness, a darkness caused not by the absence of light but by the addition of something that was stopping the light getting through.
It wasn’t night-time that was making it dark.
The Defender was buried in snow.
You know what?
I didn’t panic.
I mean obviously I took a couple of deep breaths and my heart jumped with shock.
But I didn’t go into full-on panic mode.
I didn’t start gasping for air.
I didn’t open the Defender’s windows and claw at the snow, desperate to see the sky again.
I didn’t scream and wail.
>
I pulled Lucky onto my lap and stroked him while breathing slowly and calmly.
In late 2010 I went to the Snowbombing Festival in Austria to review an up-and-coming indie rock trio. Having never been skiing, not really liking the snow or cold, and having never actually got around to seeing the band, my irreverent take was to spend the entire article talking about being buried alive in an avalanche.
I even did some lazy research on how to survive being buried in snow.
I’d read the wikiHow page, which came with pictures.
To be honest, compared to actually being buried in an avalanche, I was in no jeopardy at all.
I was warm and dry, I had plenty of oxygen, plenty of space to move about, food, water, clothing, and I knew which way was up.
The clock on the dash said it was 10.36, so it was theoretically light outside. I looked out of the windows to see if I could see daylight filtering through the snow. There was nothing. Just grey darkness.
The Defender had a sunroof, which was how I was planning to get out, but it was unhelpfully tinted so I couldn’t see through. It was, however, manually operated, which meant I could open it and wouldn’t have to try to smash my way out.
My plan was to open the sunroof and allow the snow to fall on to the front seats of the car and in doing so clear a space for me to crawl through and out. I scrabbled around in the footwell and found a random CD case that I would use as a shovel to dig the snow out of the way.
I was so intent on my escape that I almost forgot to think about what I was going to do when I did escape. I very nearly left without taking anything with me, which would have put me in a far more dangerous situation than I was currently in.
I also very nearly forgot about Lucky.
It took me an hour to gather everything I needed for my expedition. I took some food, spare clothes, thermal underwear, and gloves, a knife (no idea why), a torch, and all the phone batteries.
I stashed my bulging rucksack in the passenger footwell and slowly opened the sunroof, expecting a flurry of snow to fall into the Defender.
Nothing fell. It was literally ice.
I tried to scoop at it with my hands, but it was rock solid. In the end I had to chip at it with the corner of the CD case. It took for ever and was exhausting. After I had been chipping away for an hour I’d only made a hole about a foot deep. My stomach began to churn and I was wondering if maybe I should start panicking just a little more when I stuck the CD case in and a huge chunk of ice fell on us, followed by a flurry of snow that buried me and Lucky, causing a frenzy of barking and coughing.
Then I looked up and saw the sky.
It turned out that the wind must have picked up overnight because the Land Rover was buried in a snowdrift with snow piled around and over it; but the surrounding snow level wasn’t much deeper than it had been the night before, maybe up to the top of my thighs.
In the darkness of last night, I had seen nothing beyond the road, but in the daylight I could see a smattering of houses gathered around a lake (loch?) across the fields. The closest looked about half a mile away – an easy distance normally and surely a manageable one through the snow.
I reached down, grabbed my filled rucksack and the empty smaller one and coaxed Lucky onto the roof of the Land Rover. He looked at the snow suspiciously and then, when I smiled at him, he looked at me even more suspiciously. I petted him again. ‘You have no idea what’s coming.’
Have you ever tried to stuff a dog into a rucksack? I wouldn’t recommend it. Lucky ended up with his head and paws sticking out of the top and the drawstring pulled tight around his torso to keep him from wriggling out. It looked, and was, cruel. But the alternative was him staying in the truck and either freezing or starving to death, so cruelty won.
I clambered down off the Defender looking like a doubled-up version of a foreign exchange student, with the rucksack of essentials on my back and Lucky in his rucksack on my front. They were both really fucking heavy and I struggled to stay upright in the snow, stumbling first forward and then back as I tried to get my balance.
Despite the effort it took to wade through it, I soon learnt the snow actually worked in my favour. If I waded slowly and gently, the snow supported my legs and helped to balance my heavy load.
I still wished I had done more leg work at the gym and bothered to learn how to engage my core.
I’m not going to write in detail about the walk to the cottage because I have no desire to relive it.
Ever.
I will say that by the time we got to the cottage it was nearly dark. That the walk there was the hardest thing I had ever done and made the walk up the M1 feel like a country stroll to the pub. I spent the whole walk petrified that I was going to fall forward onto my face and drown in the snow as I wouldn’t have the strength to lift myself up again. Lucky whined and moaned so much I very nearly dropped his rucksack and left him, and the only reason I didn’t was I didn’t have the energy to lift my arms and take him off.
Five hundred yards from the cottage my legs simply wouldn’t work any more and I thought I was going to tip forward and die face first in the snow, but Lucky chose that exact moment to start barking hysterically and, given the choice between staggering on or dying while listening to that racket, I chose the former. So, crying, cursing and vowing to never call Lucky a good boy again, I dragged myself the rest of the way.
When we got to the cottage, I dumped the rucksack and Lucky unceremoniously on the doorstep and tried the front door.
Locked.
I jogged around the house and found the back door.
Locked.
I had just struggled through hell to get there, so I wasn’t going to let something as small as a locked door keep me from food and shelter. I found a small window that I thought I would be able to fit through and smashed it open.
I managed to hoist myself up onto the ledge and, too late, realised I should have put something over the broken glass as my clothes caught and ripped while I clambered through the window and fell in a heap onto the kitchen floor on the other side.
It was colder inside the cottage than outside.
I found a light switch and flicked it. Nothing. No gas came out of the cooker when I turned it on either.
I stumbled up the stairs and checked the bedrooms, but there was no one in them. I half slid back down and checked the front room, but it too was untenanted.
I checked the cupboards. Sugar, tea, and a few cans and other bits. The fridge was empty.
I started to panic. Where was the food?
I ran back upstairs. The beds had duvets and pillows on them, but no sheets or covers. The bathroom was bare – no toothbrushes, toothpaste, shower gel. No face creams or washes. I checked wardrobes and drawers and bookshelves and the airing cupboard. A few knick-knacks, a couple of spare duvets and pillows, but no photos or clothes or personal items. There were three books left in a bedside cabinet and that was it.
It was a holiday cottage.
A freezing, empty and lifeless holiday cottage.
My immediate reaction was to try somewhere else, but it was nearly dark, the snow had soaked through my waterproof trousers and my legs were freezing, the nearest house was maybe another half a mile away and, looking out of the window, I saw that it had started to blizzard again. I was physically exhausted and could barely walk through the house let alone drag myself through snow.
Leaving was not an option.
I had to stay put and I had to get warm. Now that I was cooling down after my epic battle to get there I was already shivering so badly that my body was twitching violently as if I were having a series of mini fits. Unless I could find some way to warm the cottage up, I was going to freeze to death.
The front room had an open fire with a huge stack of newspapers and a basket of logs to the side.
Even my limited knowledge of wood burning told me that a small basket of logs wasn’t going to last long, so there had to be more somewhere. Or at least there did if I was g
oing to survive the night.
I found the keys to the back door hanging on a nail by the door frame and opened it. The wind blew snow and hail in my face and took my breath away.
There was a storage cupboard just outside the back door, which was locked. I used the other key on the back-door key ring to open it.
It was filled with logs.
I believe I may have punched the air with joy.
Then I heard Lucky barking from the front and realised he was still stuck in the rucksack.
I don’t know how long it took me to get the fire going.
I do know that it was fully dark, and Lucky was shivering as uncontrollably as I was, by the time I coaxed more than a few sparks from the logs.
I used up half the stack of newspaper by the fireplace and a good number of the smaller logs that, I soon learnt, burn a lot quicker and easier than the big ones. I was lucky that they had left four boxes of matches, as I used two boxes.
But I did it. I got the fire going because Lucky and I had not come all that way, been buried in a blizzard and trekked through three foot of snow for nothing.
I was determined that we would survive long enough to do what we had come to Scotland for. We would find people. Dead or alive.
It seems unlikely that I, someone who can panic at the sight of a long escalator, should have such a strong determined streak, but I do. When I make up my mind about something then that is it. I am all in. All the way.
And so it was with James and me. I was all the way in. Love, marriage, baby in the baby carriage.
I should probably have checked with him that he felt the same way.
But they never do have that moment in the romantic novel or movie do they? There’s never a scene where the couple write To Do lists and check they match.
The first throes of love are too heady and exciting to be adult about your needs and expectations. Your needs and expectations at the beginning are sex, laughter, booze, more sex, maybe some food a few times a week, and then some sex again.
Then, if you make it through those first few months, ‘I love you’.
Last One at the Party Page 16
