Spring time

I was very happy to stand next a museum horse and carriage

It's officially spring time here in South Korea. The temperature has reached the high teens during the day and we have the odd rainy day too. Compare that to the dry, sunny (still chilly) winters here and you have something that plays havoc with my mind.


In the UK the winters are dark, wet and bloody cold. Up in the North where I come from we also have that biting cold wind from the North Sea that cuts through you like excalibur on steroids. So to have blazing sunshine all through December to February with little or no precipitation is not natural to me. As I said it does get on the chilly side in the morning and at night during this months. It even snowed for a day once but it soon melted. However, it's not really winter to me.

Winter to this well rounded chap from Middlesbrough is all about getting up when it's dark, going to work in the dark and then coming home in the dark. The hours of daylight come and go within the blinking of an eye and they're mostly sleet filled affairs with a wind that numbs your skull. It's fairly bloody depressing and you enter an almost state of hibernation. At least I did during my last winter at home in 2010.

So anyway, the reason I've been so quiet is that during February, I took my wife and stepdaughter to visit our sceptred isle. We did York (my favourite city bar none) and London, of course. We also spent a lot of time in my home town and I noticed it wasn't as cold as it used to be. For the first time I wondered if this climate change was actually a thing and not some form of brainwashing. For years I've scoffed at the idea of making schoolchildren believe that polar bears are clinging to icebergs and it's all our fault. In fact wasn't there a ship sent to prove the ice was melting but in turn got itself stuck in the ice that wasn't supposed to be there?


Back to my UK visit and one of the things I noticed more than anything was the difference in lifestyle between people in my home town and those I observed in London. Now, those of you who know me will attest that I'm an ex fatty who has made a career of putting it on then getting super fit and losing it all again, many times over. In fact I'm now about where I'd like myself albeit with a few niggles in both calves.

With this in mind I think I'm qualified to say that quite a lot of people in my home town looked that they had 'lifestyle issues' for want of a polite phrase.  I'm not judging but it's something that I noticed almost straight away and wasn't something that I remember from when I lived there. In London however, everywhere we looked people were jogging, running, cycling and seemed to have a purpose about them.

Is the North/South divide that great now? Have we become a nation divided socially, professionally and culturally? Was this always the case and I my head was so far up my own arse that I didn't notice?