So an Englishman walks into an igloo...

No globetrotter am I, but still I would like to visit Hamburg, Germany, Sandwich, Massachusetts, and Worcestershire, England, just for the burgers and the sammies and the sauce.

And if I hurry to get to Worcestershire, I can see where an Englishman built an igloo in his girlfriend's back garden. 

Just because it snowed there, I guess. 

The fellow's name is Ben Crutch and he said he could have used some "tips from real Eskimos" to make the job easier.

Uh, we call them "Inuits" now, but whatevs.

Ben has this bucket list, and when he sprang forth on a recent Sunday, he saw that only making 500 ice bricks and stacking them up stood between him and checking off "having an igloo."

He's a carpenter-joiner over in England, so he went all the way, making the bricks, stacking them, and installing a light, a door, and and a window. 

It took eight hours ago, and really, if you had started on your igloo eight hours ago, you'd be reading this in a much chillier room. 


He's a self-taught iglooer.  He made each of the 500 bricks by packing snow into a washbowl, and even though he said later he should have "googled the correct method," his worry that there might be a problem with the roof did not come true.

Friends came over and brought him wheelbarrows filled with snow, and that's how he was able to stack that thang to over seven feet in height. That made it cozy inside, with the ice acting as a great thermal barrier. 



The differences between the blog you're reading, whimsically entitled "Castles Made of Sand," are (a) that the only wheelbarrow we have around here sits unused in the shed, and (b) it takes a lot less than eight hours to crank out this word salad every day.

In eight hours, I can write four of these and take two naps.  And I often do!