“I live in the north of England, I’m used to freezing cold temperatures”
Oh honey. That’s what the pilgrims said. They mostly died.
please please listen/read the transcript to Neil Gaiman on NPR’s Wait Wait Dont Tell me because he talks about this and it’s wonderful!
Here’s the main piece:
SAGAL: Why did you move from England, reputedly cold and dreary, to the upper Midwest? Was England not cold and dreary enough?
GAIMAN: Nobody had really explained the whole cold thing to me.
SAGAL: Really?
GAIMAN: Yeah.
SAGAL: It was a surprise?
GAIMAN: Well, no. I was arrogant. I was foolish. The English thing where you think you know it all, I thought I understood cold. I thought, okay.
SAGAL: Oh yes.
GAIMAN: Water gets white and fluffy and it falls from the sky. Puddles go hard and slippery. That’s cold.
SAGAL: No problem.
GAIMAN: I did not understand the acres, the depth.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: How much colder it can be. I didn’t understand what it means to walk out of doors and take a deep breath, the hairs in your nose freeze and you go, “Oh, it’s a little below zero.”
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And then that thing that you do when you walk out and you take a deep breath and you cough because it hurt and you go, “Oh, 25 below.”
#true#apparently in American gods when shadow moves to the Midwest and almost dies because he’s an idiot and doesn’t understand how cold works#that was a self insert about NG moving to the Midwest and not knowing how cold works
yeah as a lifelong wisconsinite, i had never really seen my state truly represented in media until that scene the first night in wisconsin when shadow tries to walk somewhere at night and nearly freezes to death
there is a not insubstantial scene in the book where shadow winterizes his windows and i absolutely loved it
neil was definitely traumatized by moving to minnesota
The trouble with Brits is simple.
We have a lot of weather and confuse that with ‘extremes’ of weather.
Yeah, whenever a Brit says “It’s HOTTER than anywhere in England” it’s like, yes, it’s super humid. South Carolina is worse, but they have air conditioning.
It’s SUPER HOT. Yeah, live in New Mexico. Summer norm is 96F/36C. That’s the average. But at least it is a dry heat. PFFT! Thank the USA for air conditioning!
It’s so hot in the US in places, you can’t get in the lake or ponds because brain-eating amoebas start to REALLY multiply in still waters and can kill you. So you can’t even go swimming. And you thought the massive swarms of mosquitoes were bad? Nah!
Phew! Thank Uncle Sam for a/c!
I love the UK, but they need more a/c and less assuming the heat is going to go back to normal.
