calving

or breaking away

Saturday.

The frost was likely deeper an hour ago, but it still takes me a good few minutes to scrape the windscreen so my fingers are raw and sore for a while after I set off. The news is about, among other things, an iceberg. Scientists have been watching the romantically named A23a for 40 years following the moment it calved from the Antarctic shelf. Back then, it was declared the biggest ever recorded. Bigger than the entire Greater London area. Across the intervening decades, those following it have reported its relative stability, yet over the past year it has finally and spectacularly disintegrated. The curious tone of the news item means I don’t know whether to worry about this in a climate emergency way or adopt a less alarmist perspective. I consider switching channel but then remember they’re all going to offer me exactly the same news from exactly the same source, just packaged up in slightly different language as befits their various audiences.

My mother’s house is warm and so as soon as I step over the door I take off the jacket, hat and gloves I needed outside. It was never reliably or uniformly warm when I was growing up. On days like this, even with the Rayburn blazing in the kitchen and the open fire spitting in the back room, you would delay going to the bathroom for as long as you could and hover over the toilet seat when you got there. At bedtime, you’d fight over the portable oil heater then in the mornings, you’d get dressed under the covers with the electric blanket on.

I had hoped it would get easier to untangle my complex feelings about a messy adolescence marked by long stints caring for my mother and grandfather in this house but each time I return I realise again it hasn’t.