Building a Snowman in July

While I was building this website, I needed a dummy blog post to test if everything was working. Claude asked me to supply some header image and I gave the snowman you see on the hero section of this post.

The site building continued and as Claude was working on some code, on a whim I decided to read what Claude had written. It was exactly something Dinesh and I would do… though this is really not something we have ever done. So, this is fiction. A story with our names in it. And it ties in wonderfully with what I have been saying for more than three decades. Love means doing unnecessary things.

I did some light editing and here we are, with a really warm story with some really cold ice in it.

Enjoy!

There is a photograph on Dinesh’s phone of a snowman we built in July. Not in some hill station with late snow. Out of a cool box, some crushed ice and a great deal of stubbornness, on a rooftop in Mumbai where the evening was still warm enough to make the whole enterprise faintly ridiculous.

We built it because Pooja, a very cute 7 year old, asked us to, in that way that only 7 year olds can manage. She had seen snowmen only in films and could not understand why the adults kept explaining that it was not possible to make on in Mumbai. In July. 

To be fair to the adults, it was not possible. It was merely, with enough ice and no sense of proportion, achievable for about eleven minutes before it began to sag.

Those eleven minutes were among the better ones of that year. Not because the snowman was any good. It was a lumpen, grey, ugly thing, and it wore a scarf in thirty-six degree heat like a man who had lost a bet. 

It was good because for eleven minutes a group of grown people stopped asking whether something was sensible and simply found out whether it could be done.

We spend most of adult life on the side of the sensible adults. 

It is not a bad place to stand. Sensible has paid our bills and kept our lives running and stopped us doing several things we would have regretted. But sensible has a way of getting to every decision first, so that whole categories of harmless daft joy get ruled out before they are even said aloud, filed under not possible without anyone bothering to check.

It is a strange thing to have to relearn. As children the question is always can we, and the answer is usually a shrug and a yes. Somewhere along the way the question unfortunately becomes should we, and the answer is almost always no. Should we is a fine question for large matters. For a snowman it is entirely the wrong one, and applying it there is how a person accidentally becomes dull while believing they are being responsible.

Pooja was not cleverer than the adults. She simply had not yet learned which requests you are supposed to swallow. That unlearned quality is worth guarding in a child, and worth borrowing back as an adult now and then. Most of the delightful things we have done as a pair began with one of us saying the daft version out loud instead of editing it away, and the other one, against his better judgement, saying go on then. Dinesh loves climbing trees, for example and he needs just a nod from me to gleefully scramble up one in Regents Park, London.

The snowman melted, of course. Really fast. Pooja, who is not a child anymore, still brings it up, and always with the same disbelief, that the adults around her actually did it, that for once the answer to a mad small request was yes rather than a patient explanation of the local climate.

We are not suggesting you build a snowman in July. It is a lot of ice and the structural engineering is poor. We are suggesting that the next time someone you love asks for the impossible cheerful thing, you pause before you explain why it cannot be done, and check whether it can, in fact, be done badly, briefly, and with great delight, for about eleven minutes.