Cold
Monday 1 September 2025
The Remainder
article
COLD. The local had heard rumours of the two men from Geneva, and their interest in the town, in the doctor. Now, the four of them sat about a small wooden table in the kitchen playing bridge. To his left, the writer – British – and to his right, the photographer – Swiss. Both in their late thirties, inquisitive and softly spoken. Together they were working on a project, yet no one quite understood what for. Across from the local sat the doctor – his doctor – who had invited him to play. The moon had risen slowly between their hands. It could have been any time of evening, no one felt obliged to check.
Bridge is a game of four players and two teams, pairs who sit opposite one another, and complete one another's ‘tricks’. The men played sparsely, and spoke by turns. The visitors from Geneva discussed their experiences traveling with refugees in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Africa: Palestinians fleeing Gaza; Cypriots crossing the line; Mozambicans seeking asylum. They discussed the ethics of photography, of communism, of the National Health Service. They spoke of ancient Greece, and imagined together the continuities, the communities, that existed in a world before nation states. Their tone was serious in its laughter.
The doctor listened under the camouflage of his thick glasses, interrupting only to ask his patient a question: Had he heard this news? Had he seen these pictures? What did he think of Harold Wilson? He recited, in jest, a line or two from the Iliad. He poured wine, and fiddled with the curtains, the moonlight, and in these adjustments somehow shrunk the space between them.
So, the local offered stories from the village, folk-tales and gossip. He spoke the names of children, wives, hamlets, pubs and fairs, rivers and seasons – the same everywhere except here. He spoke of the doctor himself – his arrival, their meeting, and the cough he had cured simply by listening – who interjected only to connect their rivers to the Rhine, their seasons to those of Cyprus, their troubles to the ancient world. And the visitors listened in turn, eagerly and with expertise, asking questions, playing cards, until – it seemed – one team had lost, and the other had won.
Outside, the men eased themselves into the night. The visitors and the local, now alone together, somehow displaced, exchanging farewells. And it was only here that they realised their shared name: John. All four. Even the doctor. How simple and strange a revelation? So that when the moon dipped beneath the trees they left in some ways changed and others precisely the same, to their unknown projects, their separate tracks, and the clarified cold.
*
In the mid-1960’s the writer John Berger travelled to Gloucestershire with his friend and collaborator, the photographer Jean Mohr to follow a country doctor, an acquaintance – and later friend – named John Sassall. The result of this collaboration was the book A Fortunate Man (1967) which included written vignettes and photographs depicting Sassal, his patients, the local villages, practices, pubs and the rural environment he worked in.
The book is extraordinary in its insight into the life of one man, and what he – and his occupation – comes to represent for a local community, as well as the toll this takes on him, and the strength of his character in meeting this quite ancient obligation: that of the ‘medicine man’. It has been described by many as ‘a masterpiece of witness’.
One of the earliest stories Berger tells is of a patient – a woman in her late thirties – who Sassal first met ten years earlier when complaining of a cold. This cold soon turned into a way of being for the woman, who then suffered from insomnia, and asthma, despite X-rays and tests which initially returned normal results. Berger writes: “She was timid of anything outside the cage of her illness.” Sassal suspected the cause of this illness to be emotional distress, but could not get the woman – or her mother, for whom she was by now caring – to suggest a possible cause. They swore, Berger writes, ‘...she had no worries’.
Two years later – eight years before Berger’s retelling – Sassal discovered a cause. A man from the Salvation Army, the manager of a dairy in which she had worked, had begun an affair with her, and then abandoned her shortly after. And despite Sassal’s direct questioning of the mother (why not the daughter, herself?), she never addressed it or answered him, and her symptoms lead to a material decline, a “structural deterioration of the lungs”, a life shut-in. In closing the story Berger writes:
“Before, the water was deep. Then the torrent of God and the man. And afterwards the shallows, clear but constantly disturbed, endlessly irritated by their very shallowness as though by an allergy. There is a bend in the river which often reminds the doctor of his failure.”
There are many such observations from Berger throughout the book, written in concert with the images from Mohr, that – one must assume – speculate on the connections between the landscape, and the doctor's work. How the outside influences the inside should be no surprise to a medical professional, those who are well-versed in the idea of porous membranes, bacterial infections, and even psychosomatic – culturally mediated – ‘shocks’; the absent-minded ‘common sense’ of the discrete unit of the body, singular and impenetrable. Indeed, for Sassal, “common-sense has been a dirty word [...] for many years now.”
There is no single body. A Fortunate Man begins with the passage: “Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place.”
‘Cold’ is a term of the landscape. The adjective cold articulates, as the OED writes, that ‘well-known quality of the air’ – the quality of being a “temperature sensibly lower than that of the living human body”. It is an ancient word, practically unchanged since its Old English use in the second half of the first millennium (the Proto-West Germanic is also # *kald). It is a relative term, a conceptual relation between the inside and the outside. The word is attested, during this period, in a West-Saxon translation of the Book of John in the Wessex Gospels, begun around 990, and supervised by Ælfric of Eynsham. In John, verse 18, is written:
Ðā ðēowas and ðā ðegnas stódon æt ðām glēdon and wyrmdon hig, for ðǣm hit wæs ceald; witodlīce Petrus stód mid him and wyrmde hine.
[Then the servants and the attendants stood at the coals and warmed themselves, because it was cold; truly Peter stood with them and warmed himself.]
To have (or catch) a cold – the term here, a noun – is a sense developed later, in Middle English, so called because the symptoms resemble those of exposure to cold, as the OED write, “any disease attributed to an excess of the quality of coldness within the body or part of the body”; the presence or ‘superfluity’ of “cold humours”. This sense is first attested in the late 1300’s, in the alliterative poem The Siege of Jerusalem, in a description of the ailments of the hero Titus who, before his conversion to Christianity, is described as ‘crooked against nature’:
The freke [man] for the fayndom of the fadere blysse,
With a cramp and a colde caught was so hard
That the fyngres and feet, fustes and joyntes
Was lythy [limp] as a leke and lost han here strengthe
Of course, one can also be ‘cold’ more abstractly – the cold-blooded (1609), cold-hearted (1616), cold shoulder (1816), cold caller (1972) – often construed as a negative act or character trait. But is it not through the cold-eyed (1819) work of Berger’s witnessing, of Mohr’s camera, that such a warm – an incisive, encompassing – portrait of Sassal, of England, of Autumn be drawn?
For me, it seems Autumn is something Baroque. The cold invites inspection. In Baroque art, literature and science, God is revealed through the complexity of his creation – an idea that forces the artist, or the scholar, to invent ever-more complex and 'closer' forms of expression and inquiry. The modern microscope was invented during the development of the Baroque (the mid-C17th). The term Baroque, it has been claimed, derives from the Portuguese term barroco, the Latin ‘verruca’ the fractal image of a ‘wart’.
It should be no surprise then that Berger, the storyteller, once described Carivaggio – himself a formative influence on Baroque painting – as his favourite painter.1 Rationalising this choice, in part, Berger reads Carivaggio’s work as that of a witness; canvases which observed not from a ‘privileged position’ the crowds of day-to-day life, but drew them with “no protective space and no hierarchical focus of interest”, with precisely a lack of “proper distance.” He cites The Calling of St. Matthew, which “depicts five men sitting round their usual table, telling stories, gossiping, boasting of what one day they will do, counting money...”
No one, of course, could accuse Berger of himself taking a Baroque perspective; or that the Baroque – in its entirety – was so simple a ‘way of seeing’! But rather, perhaps, what Berger and Mohr (and maybe Sassall himself) show in A Fortunate Man are the benefits – against ‘common-sense’ – of the cold itself, of what it brings on, or out: a lack of focus, protection, distance? Berger writes:
“English autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world. The air is cold. The floorboards are cold. It is perhaps this coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than a month ago because of the very slight frost. There is a smell of toast. And on the block of butter small grains of toast from the last impatient knife. Outside, there is sunlight which is simultaneously soft and very precise. Every leaf of each tree seems separate.”
This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout