Personally, I love the snow, but I know not everyone feels like that. Something that can transform the world overnight into a fairyland (as long as you’re not in the middle of a city) is just simply magical. But I think part of it is a childhood memory of my first time ever trip abroad. It was with my father in 1964, when I was fifteen. We went for a month, over Christmas and New Year, and the Cold War was in full swing. I stared open-mouthed at soldiers with submachine guns, at bullet holes in windows, at streets filled with trams and lorries and horses and carts, and hardly a car in sight other than those driven by party officials. It was my father’s first visit back to the Poland he’d left during the war, and it was a dramatic experience. I was lucky in that my relatives lived in Krakow, a beautiful historic city – but better still, for me, was that it was within reach of Zakopane, in the Tatra mountains. We took the train, which zig-zagged uphill for four hours (it’s two hours
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