You know it's freezing cold when your local rivers begin to freeze over. This has happened here on a few occasions. It's also usually accompanied by some snowfall. Dredging through the depths of my memory December 1981 to January 1982 springs to mind, or rather, I remember a period in my childhood with days and evenings spent sledging and making ice slides which would coincide with this record cold period.

The next really severe cold event I can remember was in February 1986. Most of my evenings were spent ice skating on a local pond which was frozen solid for around a week, also the river Clyde near Motherwell was partly frozen over too with large ice flows...but you never dared walk on it as the thickness of the ice was unknown. Thin ice on a river, or deep pond is not something to mess with and wisely I took heed of that message. Tragically many youngsters don't.

This was the most severe spell of cold weather in my lifetime in this part of the world. By this time I had a few meteorological instruments in my garden and had begun keeping records. The first three weeks of December 1995 had been on the cold side with quite a few snowfalls and hard frosts. The truly cold weather begun on the 20th. For the next 4 days the temperature barely scraped above freezing during daylight and at night it would plummet below -10°C under clear skies and dustings of snow.

By Christmas day everything was covered in rime giving the impression of a white Christmas - though there was actually only a few millimetres of snow on the ground. By this point it was clear that some very cold days lay ahead as the air was coming from northern Scandinavia. That day the temperature barely rose above -4°C and the following night it fell below -14°C which was a new record low for my site. Much of the next week was plagued by freezing fogs, at some points you could actually feel the small ice particles land on your face.

On the evening of the 27th I went out for a drink with a friend to a local bar. After chucking out time we stood on the street trying to flag a taxi.....it was far to cold to walk the 1 mile distance home. The town (Wishaw) was deserted not even a car in site never mind a taxi, we tried phoning taxi-cab numbers but there was no answer. After around 5 minutes we got a lift from the pub landlord who had seen us freezing out on the streets. His theory was that the taxi drivers were probably worrying that there diesel might freeze and had chosen to take their cabs off the road. When I was dropped off at my house I had a look at the thermometer in the garden...for the first time in my life I was standing in sub -20°C air. I'd heard previously that if you spat in that sort of temperature your saliva would turn to ice before it reached the ground, I gave it a go.....but it didn't work. However over the next few days I seen many a bearded man with ice clinging to his beard or moustache, quite a comical site.

From the 27th until late on the 30th the temperature remained below -10°C night and day, the minimum being -23.1°C during the early hours of the 29th. By this time my local river had frozen solid, the river Clyde in Glasgow was frozen over too. The news carried stories of people freezing to death from exposure, one in particular I remember was a young lad who had chosen to walk home from his local pub, hypothermia got the better of him and apparently became unconscious and froze to death.

The thaw set in proper by the 31st and this unleashed all sorts of problems countrywide with burst pipes and water mains.

A wee bit of something different: 21st December 2007

Keep the temperature sustained around -4ºC, throw in some freezing fog patches, and maintain for many hours. Voila! The air will sparkle and glitter before your very eyes. Well, that's what happened here on the evening of December 20th and throughout the 21st. Quite bizarre and very rare indeed. Welcome to the land of the ice needle! A majestic sight and no doubt a rather local phenomena. It's like having stars in your eyes. Watching what can only be described as a shower of glitter gently falling all around you. Some people thought it was snow - but on close examination when it's landed it's thin pointed single spikes of ice less than 1mm thick and around 2mm long. Some people thought it was drizzle - well at -4ºC it certainly was not, although it did feel like the finest drizzle on the skin as the ice melted on contact. These ice needle showers came and went for hours - and by the end some parts of Wishaw had a couple of centimetres of accumulation, to all intents and purposes it seemed like thick rime deposits. Illuminated spider's webs were breaking under the strain.

Initially I thought I had witnessed something known as Diamond dust, but after some reading, I realised this was altogether different. Ice needles - quite stunning! Three ice days on the trot in 2007, almost as stunning!

Global warming doesn't mean these conditions can't be repeated, although their occurrence may become less frequent. The law of averages, even taking global warming into account, suggests a couple of significantly cold winters will make their way to a town near you soon.

And sure enough they certainly did at the turn of the decade and into the 2010's