by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

My most painful memory of this cruel month must be the night I was scampering up Mount Royal Boulevard at 3 a.m.over an unprecedented terrain of sharp mud stalagmites. Strutting well behind were two veteran frontmen of a local band. One was former Essential guitarist Mike Lynes, who lives in London, sporting little insulation over his velvet blazer and hairsprayed do, a look designed to honour the memory of Brian Jones. Alongside marched the insanely unhatted rockabilly songster Slim Sandy, a hearty Swede who explained that he had decided to take the winter head on. As a survivor of frostbite, that philosophy didn't impress me much. Once inside the car I blasted the car heater in an effort to duplicate the Finnish sauna trick, knowing that if the car died it would take a few extra minutes for the three of us to become a morbid roadside cryogenic attraction. But Slim Sandy kept turning down the heat. It drove me nuts. Motoring in a freezing vehicle depresses the hell outta me.

• At an average of -15.6C - which is five clicks below the normal - this will be the coldest Montreal January since records started in 1941 - with the exception of the still memorably sucky first month of 1994, which clocked in at -16.5. January 1970 was also -15.6C. The warmest was -3.6C in 1990. Or so Réjean Ouimet, meteorologist at Météo Média tells me: "Five degrees below normal is a real lot, especially in the coldest month of the year," he says.

• Northern populations are a bright, inventive and miserable lot, a result of living in the land of long shadows. A New Scientist survey ranked the 65 countries with the happiest populations, which was led by Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. The unhappiest were Romania, Russia and Armenia. Hot = happy, whereas cold… sucks. Although somehow Canada, at 11, still came out ahead of Australia (13), the USA (15), the U.K. (16) and Japan (20). I bet they surveyed us in the summer.

• Weather reporters consider it their duty to terrorize the civil population. First, before metric, temperatures almost never went into the negatives. Fahrenheit was very cheerful in that way. But now it's minus and negative all winter long. Plus this crazy "wind chill factor" stuff is a fraud. It's not universally windy everywhere in town. Besides, why not put it in happier terms? They could say, "It's minus 10 but feels like plus 10 but with freakishly cold winds." And the weather apparatchiks also refuse to acknowledge that even in the winter the sun provides some slight warmth. The Sun Warmth Factor should immediately replace the Wind Chill Factor, as in: "It's minus 20 but with the sun warmth factor it feels like minus 19.5."

• I always feel guilt when I drive past people waiting for a bus on a cold day. Half the time I'm going right where they wanna go. I could say "hop in" and drop them off and it would be a pleasant experience. But it just isn't done, even though hitchhiking was still practiced by non-prostitutes until the 1970s here. But it became verboten, thanks no doubt to a secret plot by the evil oil companies. Last year an acquaintance was questioned by cops for a lift home he gave to the kid who lives in the apartment downstairs from him. He was flabbergasted. We should rescrutinize the politics of hitching. Once, in Costa Rica, travelling with an Elvis Gratton-like Quebec City bar owner, we zoomed past two girls hitching on a mountain road to Manuel Antonio Beach. Elvis explained that he had been robbed by a couple of hitchhikers in Quebec, whom he later tracked down and had beaten. Anyway, I later met the two girls we snubbed. Sitting on the monkey-and-iguana-infested beach, one said she was 16 and from the Plateau. She had thumbed through Central America with another girl. So, paranoia aside, hitching still could work.

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