Whatever view you hold causally on climate change, clearly there are now many mild days in Nov-Mar and many when temperatures surge up into double figures, and we never used to experience that in 1970s-80s winters. I say that remembering those winters in South Wales, and now being based in and preferring Britain’s relatively cooler north.
In the present early winter, Britain actually has already had one snowy cold snap, but on either side of it a lot of milder time, and I have just seen really strikingly what that was like at south coast latitude. I had cause to be in Southampton on Nov 24-5 and 9 Dec 2023, both dates when the weather was bright and more springlike than used to be possible at those dates in childhood memory, but Dec 9 had a nippy windiness too.
There were loads of folks wearing shorts. Not just one in a day. Not a few one-off sensory issue outriders like when folks see me on colder days. No. There were many! Still a minority, but steady stream of them everywhere and all through the day. Like just as casually ordinary to do then as in summer. Both adults and kids alike, as is good for social freedom. So that for Dec 9 it could actually be predicted from the earlier memory, and that prediction was right!
It is a much further, deeper scale, conditions shift and culture shift with it, to see, than already the striking but handful number of shorts I saw being happily worn on a frostier day in Manchester Feb 2019. Exactly where just last summer, this Hazel Grove High School petition was needed.
For kids it attests tragically yet again as has been a trillion times, what a horrible body abuse and slavery school uniform is. For adults, less universally, the same for all cases of mortgaged wage-slavery to dress coded or uniformed types of work, and Tory hard lines on welfare pushing them into it.
Social progress carries a painful mix of emotions, as all good feeling about it, in place of the anger there would be at not having it, is always mixed with anger at the past memory of not having it. It would be less possible to have an undiscovered shorts sensory issue in your childhood if this was happening at winter dates during it. In the world before the web, when info on the health safety of shorts in cold was not available on demand, and when the autism awareness boom had not yet happened and sensory issues had not yet become a known thing, when climate has not yet changed to have Britain in winter be like Southampton now, you could live in a region with a nasally irritating climate causing cold-like symptoms, like South Wales, or like the “Thames valley catarrh” Miriam Stoppard once mentioned in a health column.
That is the pain and identity struggle testimony to be told from this pleasure of Southampton. Even the climatic and social experience of calendrical winter, no longer always wintry, has changed and made it a potentially murkier prospect to get anyone to understand the pain of having not discovered this sensory issue identity in your childhood, how it could happen, and the frantic life fairness needs that result from it. To get that identity expressed intensely enough for the rest of your life to be sure folks will identify and remember you by it, to avert any oppressions of it now such as work dress rules and the I Daniel Blake welfare regime wanting you to accept them, and to have it attached to all back perceptions of your earlier life without anyone being allowed to choose not to attach it.
Maurice Frank
11 Dec 2023
autistic groups fairness watch 