I suppose I was nine, yes nine I’m sure. I was born and grew up in the high arctic, and right now according to Cousin Lykke it was -35 back home, Mamma had been speaking to Tant Alice on the phone last night, and I had a few minutes with Lykke at the end. She was nine too, and we liked each other enough to sit together in class. After nine years of it I should have been used to the cold.

We were back at Mum’s parents in Scotland for Christmas, which was a week away. Morfar was by trade a stone mason, but was a self employed builder, so he worked every day, no matter what the weather. I went to work with him. He was re-fronting a corner shop which was being turned into a private house. He told me he’d worked on the estate of houses when they were built when he was an apprentice forty-odd years before.

It was cold, bitterly cold, the ground was frozen solid for eighteen inches, and all my winter clothes were back at home. What I was wearing was hopelessly inadequate. My teeth chattered, my knees knocked and my fingers and toes were desperately sore. With fingers stupid from the numbing cold, I was chopping up an Edwardian oak fire surround to burn to make the tea on. Well you did in those days. You couldn’t use the cast iron ones because they didn’t burn, so they were just weighed in as scrap.

The tea was a revolting looking mahogany brew, but Morfar and his six men liked it. The recipe was simple. A big jerry can with a gallon or more of boiling water, four ounces of loose tea leaves, a pint of milk, the bottle was tall and thin and had a beer bottle type crown cap. It was called sterilised or UHT milk by most people, but Morfar and his men called it tall milk. All boiled up together with a mug full of sugar. Morfar and his men considered the use of teabags to be effeminate, all right for when their wives made tea at home, but no real man would consider using them! Using tea bags was in the same category as using an umbrella, carrying flowers or drinking half pints, something only effete southerners engaged in.

“How long do I boil it for?” I asked.

“Till the leaves don’t come to the top any more, son. Then it’ll be a good brew.” In those days I didn’t speak English, which is why I liked being with Morfar, who was from Càirinis on North Uist and spoke Gaelic. Mormor unlike my parents who both spoke Gaelic, the family language, only spoke English. Pappa didn’t get on with Mormor, which made for embarrassing silences in the house, so I was glad to get out. I think the reason Pappa didn’t get on with her was because when he met Mamma he learnt Gaelic, and Mormor, who came from Edinburgh and was a terrible snob, considered it to be an inferior language and had never bothered.

Twenty minutes of boiling. It looked revolting, it tasted like nectar. My enamelled metal mug just about warmed my hands and the scalding tea re-fired my internal furnace. I’ve never been as cold before or since but that wonderfully disgusting brew has never been called for since either. I was glad to get back home, and to Lykke too whom ten years later I married, where at least I had the clothes for the weather, and before you PC, green, whale pickling, tree hugging, environmentalist types ask, yes I had a full set of arctic furs and I still do.