Robin Pilcher

There’s always been a bit of a north/south divide in Britain and I’m really talking about the weather here, rather than politics (I know the latter is a little more relevant right now, but I choose rather to cover my ears and sing la-la-la very loudly because come on, we’ve heard it all before.) And I’m also quite peeved that my very own Cake and Eat It Too party, of which I happen to be sole member, has had its ridiculously naïve and completely impractical manifesto nicked in its entirety by Nick Clegg’s Lib Dem party! Now my political views aren’t funny any more.

So I’m going to stick to the weather. Today, there exists a 10 degree Celsius difference between the temperature in the south-east of England and the north of Scotland. People in London cannot believe that we still have the heating on and the drawing room fires lit up here. At the end of last week, the temperature dipped alarmingly, so when I went to pick up my son, his fiancée and her parents from Edinburgh airport (for a Meet the Fockers-type weekend), they sure felt it when we walked out of the terminal building.

Now Kirsty, my wife, had been getting things ready for a couple of days beforehand, so there were flowers in every room, beds turned down, towels on hot rails. She even persuaded me to jack the heating up a couple of notches which is always difficult for a Scotsman.

The next morning, the parents-in-law-to-be came down for breakfast, bearing beautifully wrapped gifts. Mine was a bottle of Nyetimber, an excellent British sparkling wine. It was handed to me and I knew instantly that it was ready to serve, my finger imprints visible on the frosted glass.

“Ah, how kind,” I remarked, “and how clever of you to have put it in the fridge last night.”

“Oh, no,” came the reply, “it’s just been in our bedroom.”

So that was it. The carbon footprint stomped merrily on my house over the weekend and the boiler wheezed to a grateful stop on Sunday evening after my return trip to the airport.