The walk home

Every afternoon Cian comes to my office around 4:15pm. We do an hour or so of English study (mainly reading and writing. He is already pretty fluent in Irish swearing). And then we walk home.
If I am walking home on my own, it takes around 12 minutes to get back. I know this because I timed myself. That's what you start doing if you live long enough in Japan.
Walking home with Cian however, that 12 minutes gets stretched out to 30 as we, or rather the boy, 'perambulates' in a meandering fashion towards our house.
Now, I can understand why he does this. Cian likes to be outside but the cruel tyranny that is school keeps him inside for the best part of the day. So when he does finally get to venture beyond the classroom walls, he naturally wants to make the most of it.
Which is fine, absolutely fine.
From April through to November.
In winter, it is not so fine.
Today the mercury in Muroran climbed no higher than minus two. There was a bitter north west wind blowing and any exposed skin was rendered raw. Cian was born in the Hokkaido heartland in winter so this sort of freezing cold weather doesn't even register with him.
His father, however, was born far from this Japanesed offshoot of Siberia and as I age, I find the cold gets deeper into my bones. By the time we got home this evening, after our usual 30 minute perambulation, I was skirting dangerously close to hypothermia.
(Funnily enough, the one time I did actually turn hypothermic was in summer in Ireland. It was August 1997, I had just come back from six months working at a scuba diving school in Thailand, and I went for a dive off Fastnet Island. My body, used to the 28 degree plus water of the Gulf of Thailand, was not ready for the relatively chilly 16 degree Atlantic Ocean. After 30 minutes underwater my body was shaking so violently I was vibrating rather than swimming through the sea. When I surfaced I didn't have the strength to climb into the boat. It took three of the crew to lift me on board. Then they had to wrap me in whatever towels they could find and fill me full of hot tea until my shaking subsided. All the other divers described the dive as "excellent" and thought we had been blessed with the weather. I have never gone diving around Ireland since).