Trying to look nonchalant, I walk on the outer edge of the footpath. Whilst this may be a life-preserving strategy, it means that I'm in the splash zone of passing cars and buses. You can imagine.
By Tuesday, we'll be back to a chilly daily maximum of minus six degrees. The dripping will stop. The water will freeze. All those wet surfaces and puddles will become treacherous, glassy patches of ice. Just when I was getting good at walking AND looking up occasionally, I'll be doing the cartoon-style-legs-spinning routine and grabbing at passers-by!
The subject of ice brings me to another dilemma. To my foreign mind, it would make a great deal of sense to avert a falling over embarrassement or injury by wearing spikes on your shoes. Stockholmers almost without exception disagree. It's not that you can't buy spikes for your shoes. They're in every Apoteket and shoe repair store. It's just that the only people who wear them are really really old. Octogenerian. I've seen about eight people in my entire time here, clicketty clicking through the entrance to the Tunnelbanna.
Therefore:
Q: Do I try to act cool and try to look like a local?
A: No spikes.
A: No spikes.
Q: Do I set aside all pretence, any illusions I might have about my age and publicly declare my ice-walking ineptitude?
A: Spikes.
Decision: There will be no limping through the doors of a Swedish sjukhus for me.
Are those your spikey shoes? I'm liking them. However, I'm interested in your ice-falling theory, as this was my major fear when I saw such events on my first trip to Paris when I was 16. But I'm sure I also saw parked cars with broken windscreens from said ice - where IS the safest place to walk? Close to the wall? Close to the gutter? Where DOES the ice fall?
ReplyDeleteThe fears and fascinations of the health hazards of foreign weather... I have had a German cycling tourist friend staying with me in Perth, and she has headed off with her bike and my tent and a bucketload of sunscreen to ride around the southwest for nearly three weeks. She is from Bavaria, where she has not been able to get on her bike for three months due to the winter, though she has been running. Apparently the really keen cyclists in Bavaria have spikes for their tyres,too. Snow and thaw and ice hold no terrors for her, but I hope she is worried about sunburn and heatstroke and dehydration as she does her cherished 100+ km a day, heading into ghastly Easterlies coming out of the desert. I think if I were in Stockholm I'd opt for the shoe spikes and the daggy look, as casts, splints and orthopaedic surgery look pretty daggy too and last for longer and cost more. Though perhaps it is possible to learn a whole new way of walking in one of life's middle decades, without having to think about every single step before taking it...
ReplyDelete