The command was always, put on some warm clothes before you go out. But we couldn't wait to get out.
Snow, white frost, ice, fantastic things. Last week, we went up to Cambrian for a prestigious dinner to celebrate a prestigious human's 65th birthday party, 65 being pretty prestigious in itself when you get right down to it, although an age far too far off for me personally to contemplate or even understand.
It's cold up there, goggle-eyed beautiful, snow on the hills, but cold.
When we started going to the Ida Valley in the mid-1980s, we were still young and stupid and never put on enough clothes, like the girlfriends of the bikers at the neighbouring Brass Monkey over Queen's Birthday Weekend, who each year choose skimpily clad over hypothermia.
We loved deep snow up to our knees, minus double figure temperatures that made the eyeballs throb like Jon Bonham's bass drum. And stretches of black ice which sent the car into crazy-twirl spins, children squealing with delight in the back seat, us in the front begging each other forgiveness for all the unkind things we had ever said, the sort of thing you say when you are about to die.
But we rarely go up there in winter any more. Even at the end of April this year, a huge roaring fire and a vintage Conray heater on full blast in the lounge still wasn't quite enough. The grandchildren, however, raced out on to the Arctic-white frost first thing in the morning in their socks and T-shirts. They both had colds within 10 minutes. The mother, who rescued them sternly, had a cold two hours later just through touching them. I am strictly an urban man who, our neighbour Barney claims, knows nothing about nothing, but I reckon the entire Maniototo should be fenced off on May 1, its inhabitants flown to safety by the New Zealand air force in those A-4 Skyhawks they never used, replaced or sold, the ones that cost $30 billion each.
But there we were last week, wool-beanied and bushy-tailed, convinced our positive state of mind would keep us warm. We stayed in a cottage owned by a legendary All Black hard man.
I paced its floors inhaling lustily, hoping there would be a trickle-down effect from air often breathed by this great take-no-prisoners New Zealander.
I felt nothing, though my wife did mention later that when she came out of the kitchen in the morning, I thundered across the lounge, knocking chairs and coffee tables everywhere, and tackled her sin-binningly around the stomach like a rodeo bull. She assumed I had been reading Self Help books again, perhaps 101 Ways To Re-Romance Your Wife.
But I guess it was All Black Trickle-Down. I did later give a speech at the prestigious birthday dinner table where the diners were either gong-gobblers from the New Year Honours List, or owned a prestigious winery.
And I haven't spoken at a dinner party since 2003.
Of course, we then came back to Dunedin's first snowfall for the year. Dunedin cold is pulled from a different meteorological filing cabinet than Central Otago cold. Or, indeed, Chicago cold.
Our daughter was heading out the door with grandchildren on each arm last Tuesday only to be told on her cellphone the city had closed down. She noted the snow barely covered her shoes.
In Chicago, the snow can reach the neck; streets appear deserted because the depth of the snow has covered all the parked vehicles. Much of the morning is spent shovelling a path from the apartment to the street.
But life goes on.
Cold, yes, but if you have been shovelling snow for three hours, you are strangely warm.
I don't think we will be going up to Central for a while. Each year the bones seem to get just that tiny bit colder and slower to rotate when bending down. But at least I am warm. And at least I am a long way off 65.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
