“O reader, do not ask of me how I

grew faint and frozen then – I cannot write it:

all words would fall far short of what it was.

I did not die, and I was not alive;

think for yourself, if you have any wit,

what I became, deprived of life and death.”

– The Ninth Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno

Do you know cold?

Do you really?

I don’t mean cold damp feet from watching a school under-14 football match from the sideline on a wet windy March, when you’d give anything for a cup of hot scald and dry socks.

I don’t mean that day you went shopping and the heavens opened, and you got soaked through and then the car was clamped and you had to walk to the office to pay the bill to get the clampers to release your car and it never stopped pouring.

I don’t mean that time you were digging rocks from the garden or a field and you kept going ’til all the light was gone and you didn’t realise the temperature until you straightened up to wipe your dripping nose and only then did you realise how stiff your back was and your hands wouldn’t straighten. Or that time you had to change a tyre by the roadside in the dark when driving home three hours from the airport and the wheel nuts jammed, and how desperate cold and tired you were, and how you suddenly felt much older. I don’t mean that time the heating broke down for three days one winter in the middle of a cold spell and you had to go stay with your parents. Or the office heating being set too low because that one clown of an open water swimmer is always complaining that the women in the office set it too high. He’s a bloody freak anyway. I don’t mean the chills and discomfort of walking past the freezer aisle after a summer swim and wishing you had long sleeves on.

I don’t mean the standing-around-in-your-jacket-after-a-swim-having-a-chat-and-cake-with-your-mates-touch-of-the-shivers.

No, I mean Bone Cold. “so, living in the ice, up to the place

where shame can show itself, were those sad shades,

whose teeth were chattering with notes like storks’.

Each kept his face bent downward steadily;

their mouths bore witness to the cold they felt,

just as their eyes proclaimed their sorry hearts“.

– The Ninth Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno I mean Cold. Down, down into your bones, down into your core, down in to your marrow, where previously you said you were cold to, but didn’t know. Not really. Not until now. Not until you got Bone Cold.

Bone Cold is why your discomfort, and my cold, are so very different, and that all other colds are insignificant beside Bone Cold. Bone Cold and chilly are both qualitatively and quantitatively different. You can get on the train at the station called Chilly but may never know there is a station called Bone Cold, because you will most likely never see a passenger embark from there. My Bone Cold cannot be mistaken for your mild chills, your passing discomfort. Your chills are warm water aquarium guppies, while my Bone Cold is a dark water bull shark. Bone Cold is the arrival of a train when you are standing too close to the edge of the railway platform and the vortex of its passing sucks you forward, and you feel scared at its overwhelming power. Bone Cold is when you come home to find your front door kicked open. Bone Cold is when the knife slipped the day after you sharpened it and it went deep, too deep and every chef who said a dull knife is the most dangerous is an idiot, the same as the people who think that setting the home heating a degree too low is the same as Bone Cold. Bone Cold is walking to warm up after a swim and moving like Frankenstein’s Monster, stumbling and jerking spasmodically, unable to straighten. Bone Cold is that kick of pain in the small of your back, that you don’t know until you have had it, but when you’ve had it, your eyes show me that you understand.

Bone Cold is when you are only 400 metres from your exit point and there’s a current running against you, and you are worried about getting back when you’ve never been worried this close to shore and the only reason you are worried is because you are Bone Cold.