I’m feeling strangely enlivened after a Christmas that should, by most measures, have been exhausting: thirteen nights away, seven different beds, 1700 miles in the car. I think this cold weather has something to do with it.

When we first moved back to Scotland, in the early 90s, we lived in an upland glen in northern Perthshire. In the team of decorators who came to do work on the house was an old painter who had been an apprentice in the winter of 1946/47. He told me that that year he had been sent with his workmates to decorate a big house in a neighbouring glen, where they had become trapped by the snow.

For several weeks the owners had housed them in an outbuilding and fed them, while the lady of the house had taught them to play bridge. When they had at last been able to leave, they had walked out on packed snow which still in some places reached almost to the tops of the telegraph poles.

This week’s footage of Aberdeenshire farmers ploughing their farm roads to leave snow banks on either side as high as their tractor cabs, reminds me of childhood winters when sights such as these were not uncommon. With them always came the fervent hope that we would be prevented from returning to boarding school at the end of the Christmas holidays.

I can vividly recall the Big Freeze of 1962/63. Before Christmas the mains pipes froze underground and we had no running water for several weeks. We drew water from a burn in front of the house, and spent a thrilling holiday of daily sledging expeditions and ice hockey on frozen lochs. A few years later, as a student at Aberdeen University and living in a draughty rented farmhouse, penetratingly hard frosts were a regular feature of winter, along with blocked country roads and days when we we were unable to drive in to the city to attend lectures.

The recent media images of a landscape transformed summon deep memories and impulses. I can still feel a childlike wonder at the sheer beauty of a freshly glistening, whitened world, an accompanying sense of innocence, a desire to be playful, along with the pleasures of breath clouding and freezing air sharp on the skin, of cocooning warmth and the sense of safety evoked by a stove and a plentiful store of logs, of clear pale skies and skeins of wild geese calling. These are winter clichés, of course, but no less real – if much less frequent these days – for that.

And then there’s the darkness. As someone who suffers mildly from seasonal affective disorder, the feeling of night closing in is accentuated by the reflective intensity of snow during daylight. 

I listened this week to a beautiful short documentary about Longyearbyen in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago. The world’s most northerly inhabited community, a mere 600 miles from the North Pole, Longyearbyen experiences round-the-clock darkness for twelve weeks each winter, while the sun remains out of sight for even longer – 113 days, until 8 March, when the whole township gathers in an annual ceremony to witness the first rays creep back over the horizon.

The idea of polar winter can be strangely thrilling, but also deeply disturbing. The most terrifying ghost story I have ever read was Dark Matter, an adult novel by the best-selling children’s author Michelle Paver, set in a primitive research station on Svalbard. It haunted me for weeks. Svalbard is also where Philip Pullman’s fictional Mrs Coulter practises her wicked ‘intercision’, the severance of children from their daemons, in The Northern Lights.

And Svalbard is the scene of one of the most extraordinary stories of human endurance I have ever heard. In 1743, a group of four Russian walrus-hunters became marooned after their ship was crushed by the ice. Fortunate enough to find an abandoned miners’ hut, they survived there for six years, until rescued, with ‘a musket and 12 shots, a knife, an axe, a kettle, 20 pounds of flour, a tinderbox, and some tobacco and pipes.’ Nearby was an inlet where eider ducks came to breed in spring. These they managed to capture in sufficient quantities to sustain them, while fending off polar bears with wooden spears. 

How they made it through the dark months, for six successive years, is beyond imagining. I can’t remember where I first came across this story but I see it has since been documented fully in a book, Four Against the Arctic: Shipwrecked for Six Years at the Top of the World by David Roberts.

Now we are past the solstice and the days are lengthening again, if imperceptibly. In about ten days’ time the sun will be back in our garden, having left it to disappear behind a hill at the end of November. I will go out and make obeisance, as I do every year. It’s a light-hearted ritual, but it I’m aware that it carries an atavistic undercurrent. 

Researching a story I wanted to write some years ago, set in Peru, I came across what seemed credible evidence of human sacrifice still secretly practised in the high Andes, by modern-day descendants of the sun-worshipping Incas. But I prefer to think of the residents of Longyearbyen and their children, wearing yellow paper sun crowns, who, every year on 8 March, wait excitedly on the steps of the old town hospital, eyes fixed on a V-shaped gap between two mountains where presently a single ray of sunshine will appear.