The first cold snap came in sideways, like a Miles solo you didn’t see coming. No warning. One night we were drinking wine on the terrace, and the next we were barricading the front door with towels and cursing the tiled floors for their bone-deep chill.
We moved to Cádiz in September. It was all heat and joy then—blinding sun, grilled sardines, the smell of eucalyptus and salt. We’d bought a house we could just about afford, just inland, and I convinced myself it was charming. Spanish rustic, I said. It’ll be warm all year, I said.
It was not warm all year.
By December, the house—built sometime in the 1940s by a man who hated insulation and probably also curtains—had turned on us. There was no central heating. No double glazing. Just long, echoing rooms and single-pane windows that rattled when the Levante blew in off the Atlantic like a bandleader who drank too much and forgot the arrangement.
It wasn’t romantic. It was freezing.
Sue wore three jumpers at once and started knitting out of pure rage. I took to walking around the house with a small portable gas heater that hissed like a suspicious hi-hat. We had two electric blankets and one surviving hot water bottle from the 1980s, and we fought over both like jazz critics fighting over Coltrane’s later period.
One night, around mid-January, I found myself sat on the couch wrapped in two blankets and a bathrobe, holding a glass of supermarket brandy like a talisman. I put on Kind of Blue. The opening notes of “So What” came in like balm on chapped skin. Sue was in the kitchen, rustling up something that may or may not have been edible. And I thought—this is absurd, but not un-beautiful.
Because here’s the thing. Jazz makes sense when the world doesn’t. When the wind sneaks in through the gaps in the walls and your fingers are too numb to write your daughter back, Miles reminds you that some things don’t need fixing. They just need listening to.
We survived that winter mostly on lentils, good jazz, and shared stubbornness. We hung up old rugs where curtains should have gone. I taught Sue how to make a Manhattan properly—bitters matter, people. And when it got really bad, we’d lie in bed, cold noses and all, listening to Sketches of Spain on the tinny little speaker we brought from Croydon.
One night she said, “I don’t miss radiators.”
I knew what she meant.
There’s something about struggling in a place you chose that feels strangely more bearable than comfort in a place you didn’t. We’d spent years in semi-detached, beige domesticity. Here, even freezing, it felt like ours. Like we’d made a choice. And maybe one day we’d put up real curtains.
Or not.
Maybe we’d just keep playing Blue in Green and pretend the wind was part of the band.
