The Common Cold Requires Special Dressing

As my doctor packed for a conference in Belgium she remembered the common cold. Europe, after all, rides north of the United States; Brussels is on a line with Calgary. And this was March.

She borrowed a heavy, hooded coat from her daughter and added woolen gloves, boots and muffler.

After a few bland seasons in Southern California she had to remind herself of vital cold-weather accessories.

March is a tricky month. It can be spritzy with daffodils and crocus, or leaden gray with clouds that chill the earth. Or both. It is a shoulder season, and wise travelers keep theirs covered.

The coldest I have ever been was not in Lapland one January nor in Antarctica at Christmastime. In those cases I was prepared. The places where I was miserable enough for frozen tears were London and Hamburg.

True, it was a winter of European gales. Also true, I had not packed for such intense and numbing cold--most of it outdoors.

In London one February night, after a performance of Verdi’s “Requiem” at the Royal Festival Hall, a friend and I decided to walk across the dark footbridge over the Thames. The wind was fierce, but we figured that we could catch a taxi more easily on the north bank, away from the concert crowd.

We had decided to take a cab, instead of the Waterloo tube, to go directly to the door of the Mayfair restaurant, where we had late-dinner reservations.

That turned out to be foolish. Every cab that passed us had passengers. On the far side of the bridge we turned toward the Strand and Trafalgar Square. The wind whipped our faces and unwrapped my wraparound coat.

We paused at empty bus stops and squinted at the list of routes. It would be a long, cold wait because of the hour and the lean Bank Holiday schedule. Theaters, by then, were dark. We were in a black hole between tube stations.

I remembered a line from a London guidebook: “All buses cover the routes in both directions--a fact one may well forget in the heat of the moment.”

Or in the cold of the night.

And so we kept trudging. There was no recrimination as to who’s idea it was to jump out of the queue back at the warmly lit concert hall. There was also little mirth.

We ended up walking to the Mayfair. I never measured the distance. I do know that the Greenhouse restaurant in Hays Mews was about to close when we arrived. And that the proprietress had to untie the belt of my camel coat because my fingers would not work. And that my red hands clashed with the linen napkin in my lap. And that my face burned.

Hamburg, by the river Elbe, was a similar tale: a walk too far on a night too cold in shoes too thin. There are times, often city times, when good sense should prevail over one’s innate sense of adventure.

To ward off deep chills I now travel with a cashmere muffler, wool gloves, long underwear and an Icelandic wool cap that pulls over your ears and stays on in the wind.

None of these items weighs much. Each has saved my skin.

I have a bureau drawer, however, which is proof that I have been caught short on the road.

There are pebbly-tan wool gloves from a New Zealand farm outlet on South Island and fuzzy-red mittens knitted by blanket maker Lena Rewell in Helsinki. There is a pair of dove-gray and black gloves designed by Sonia Rykiel. Maybe it wasn’t cold in Paris, but I couldn’t be sure.

The oddest pair is from the Falkland Islands Co. store in Port Stanley, the last clothing emporium I would see on the way to the Antarctic peninsula.

I had packed Gore-Tex ski mittens for that bottom-of-the-world expedition but I wanted another pair of wool liners. The only gloves being sold in Stanley that December day did not have full fingers, just knuckle-length stubs of wool.

“You wear them for fishing,” a clerk said when I asked. “Or for gardening or any work outdoors.”

When I shifted in my parka and protested that my fingers would freeze, she smiled and shook her head:

“You must remember, dear, that this is summertime.”