Yes, Minus 22 Degrees Is Pretty Chilly, Thanks

One of many difficult questions I faced in balmy, lovely Indonesia was: “Is it cold in England?”

Because, what do you say to folk who find 22°C (71.6°F) a bit nippy, pile on four jumpers and their thickest coat should the mercury drops to the freezing depths of 15° C60°F), and have never seen ski socks, let alone snow?

Me? I’d normally say, “Yes, very. Even in the summer, 25°C is pretty hot. In the winter, it’s often below zero.”

And then I’d try and explain what it felt like. Generally, I’d not do this very well.

Now, after spending rather more than a week in Beijing in November, plus skiing in Bansko, I thought I was inured to cold.

Yet, as you’ve probably read, there’s been a fair old cold snap across Europe lately. As with most things chilly in Europe, the weathermen blame Siberia.

Not that I was fully aware of this when we arrived in Sofia, a city whose charms are perhaps best experienced when you haven’t been taken five times round the ring road by a Balkan taxi driver with a turbo-charged meter, the nation isn’t in the grip of a flu epidemic, and when the temperature is, perhaps, just a *teensy* bit warmer than -22°C (that’s well below zero even in Fahrenheit).

Obviously, as I stumbled from the taxi to skid gracelessly on some of the black ice that Sofia does so very well at this time of year, and headed into an apparently deserted city centre evincing all the immediate charm of Darwin, or conceivably Slough, I knew none of this.

It did feel a wee bit nippy, mind you. But I had my opinions about the taxi driver to keep ME warm.

“Mum,” Z says, tentatively interrupting my rant.

“Yes?” I say.

“The word you used to describe the taxi driver. The C-word…”

I channel good parenting practice. “I shouldn’t have used that word in front of you,” I say.

Then black ice strikes again, arse flies over tip, parenting best practice flies out of the window and one of us — I’ll leave you to guess just who — has a tantrum. And uses a lot of bad words.

“F*ck! I HATE this city. The c*** could at least have dropped us at the f*cking door. We should never have left Plovdiv. And I should NEVER have got in that taxi. I KNEW that man was going to screw me. Call this a city?! It’s not even a city. It’s more like a suburban commuter town that borrowed a Russian architect for a couple of days…”

“Yes,” my son says, soothingly. “I liked Plovdiv, too. Sofia is a sh*thole. So, about the c-word… Is it actually a rude word for vagina?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s a vile, sexist and highly offensive word for a perfectly innocuous body part and I shouldn’t use it. Except about people like…”

“Mm,” he says, then decides to pick up the conversation from where it had been when I saw the sum on the taxi driver’s meter. “I’m not sure we need to finish watching Spartacus this evening. But I do think we shouldn’t go out. I think we should just get nice and warm and curl up in front of a computer…”

“Agreed,” I say. “Though given we’re two hours in, and we are in Bulgaria, and Spartacus is, as you keep saying, the only Bulgarian most people have ever heard of, we might as well finish watching the film.”

“But why?!” he says. “We know what happens. They all get crucified. Though actually the real Spartacus probably died in battle. And the love story’s completely rubbish… That would be a good short book title. ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Greatest Love Stories’…”

“Well,” I say, fumbling with notions such as completion, and wondering whether one could really describe Eyes Wide Shut as a love story, but finding my brain struggling to function in the cold… “Oh! I think that’s where we’re staying.”

A series of defiantly low-rent clothing emporia, all closed, lead through to a peeling swing door that opens, in its turn, onto an Arctic and urine-scented concrete stairwell with broken windows. This leads upwards to our destination.

I am not going to say it. I am trying not to even think it.

So Z says it.

“Mum,” he says. “This reminds me of Chungking Mansions.”

If you’re not au fait with the budget accommodation options of Kowloon, I should confirm that “like Chungking Mansions” is not a phrase deployed by real estate agents anywhere outside, conceivably, a Mumbai slum.

“Look,” I say. “It may be horrid. But we’re just going to have to stay here tonight because I’m not pounding the streets looking for somewhere else in these temperatures and I’m certainly not trying my luck with a taxi driver. Anyway, I don’t have any money left.”

Our accommodation is not, in fact, that bad. The place is split between two Soviet-era apartments on separate floors, both super-heated to the kind of toasty warmth that leads to folk wearing shorts and T-shirts on the Trans-Siberian in December, gas shortages across Western Europe and will, should even a fraction of the 1.6billion Chinese currently accustomed to wear multiple coats indoors (with floral sleeve covers over the top when cooking) decide to adopt a similar approach to winter temperatures, undoubtedly lead to rapid and irreversible climate change.

Our room must have been a living room. It’s enormous. With wood floors. And a heater that pumps out warm, toasty, blissful air by the kilowatt.

It’s fabulous, in fact. I don’t want to leave. But we have no money, our host is getting anxious about this and we need to, well, eat.

“Right,” I say. “I take it you don’t want to take a stroll around Sofia with me looking for a cashpoint?”

“Right,” my son says.

“You do?!” I say.

“No,” he says. “I don’t. I’m want to stay here and play Minecraft in front of the heater and then when you get back with the money we can go downstairs to the Irish pub and get something to eat.”

“Okey-cokes,” I say.

“Oh no!” he says, in tones of utter desolation usually resolved for incidents involving Creepers or hardware breakdown. “The adaptor’s broken.”

“What?!” I say.

“It’s broken off in the plug socket,” he says.

It is hard to express what a disaster this is.

We have, between us, our evening all lined up. It is a largely digital programme of events, comprising on Z’s side a date to play Minecraft over Skype with a friend in Peru and on mine completing the watching of Spartacus just so that we can, y’know, knock another Kubrick off the list (while in the hero’s home country), plus a little light typing. Neither fresh air nor, actually, anything outside the window features highly in this, although pyjamas do.

“Can I use the magnet on your charger to get it out?” he asks.

“What?!” I say. “No! What magnet?! No! You’d die. And break my charger. I’ll ask around and see if anyone has a spare one. Or if there’s somewhere open that sells one. I’m not optimistic, though.”

“Why not?” he says.

“Because it’s a really specialist thing, a British-to-European adaptor. This isn’t a tourist town particularly. It’s a capital city. And a small capital city, surrounded by other countries with the same electricity.”

“But my battery’s dead,” he says tearfully.

I delve into deep recesses of mother love. “I’m at 15%,” I say. “You can use 10% of that.”

And so I head out, with a parting yell of “10%! No more!”, through rich wafts of urine, into Sofia — by night!

Into Sofia in -22°C, its tramlines decorated in brown refrozen slush, its pavements a rich tapestry of black ice. A few scattered survivors of the flu epidemic bustle past, bundled against the cold and hurrying to get out of it. Sneezes echo down deserted streets.

And this is when I learn what -22°C feels like when you’re not dressed for it. Your hands feel cold even inside your gloves. When you remove your gloves, your hands hurt as though the wind is whipping ice at them — even on a night with absolutely no wind.

Without a hat, it feels as though someone is taking fine sandpaper to the tips of your ears, your nose and even your cheeks. Your eyes squint against the cold as they might squint into the wind. Your kidneys twinge, your bladder contracts, and you feel you need to pee.

It is not a temperature, in short, in which to explore a city… Let alone form a deep and lasting bond with it.