My grandmother turned down my parents' offer to pay for central heating. “It wouldn't be natural, not to feel cold in the winter.” That was back in the Sixties: it is a truth we have forgotten now. Right now, earth is hard as iron, water like a stone and the people of the frozen South are surprised and affronted.

It wasn't always like this. In the Big Freeze of 1963-64, Nash and Dixon won a bobsleigh gold medal at the Winter Olympics, but even they would have had to take second place to Barnes and Murtagh. We had the fastest sledge on Streatham Common.

The run was sheet ice and vertiginous: initially daunting, but in the weeks it stood, we mastered it utterly. From the top of the run just before Hill House Road, you could swoop beyond Hopton Road at the bottom, passing little kids and tyros and sticky-runnered sledges and fearful sledders with feet glued to the ground.

Hard winters were a fact of British life. The winter that followed the last war is remembered bitterly by all who survived it: “Without further compromise, Dickensian winter set in. Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past...” This from Anthony Powell.

The current cold snap is a remembrance of things past, a turning back to the days when prolonged freeze was part of the way we lived, rather than a novelty. The climate really has changed, and this cold weather is something of a throwback. We no longer have the time, the patience, the habit, the mindset or the clothes for it. It's a shock for the birds, too.

Bleak for a beak

For the first time in ten years, big conservationist bodies have put out what used to be an annual request: leave the wet-bobs alone. It's at times like this that disturbing ducks, geese and waders can be lethal. Birders, walkers, anglers and - if you can believe they are currently active - watersports enthusiasts have all been asked to keep clear.

If you put birds up into the air, they will burn their precious resources flying about. They need all they've got to find such little food as there is available and hold on till the weather turns. Knots, dunlins and godwits come to Britain for our lovely winters, finding them milder than the Arctic. But when the Arctic comes to Britain they face death.

All birds associated with water are suffering. A kingfisher makes its living diving into the water from a convenient perch: not much fun with the water-like-a-stone scenario. Herons wade in shallow water and stab it with the spear they carry on the end of their necks: not a strategy that works in a freeze.

Hard times: times that birds have dealt with and survived, some of them, across the course of history. And though it is somewhat counterintuitive at the moment, the ratcheting-up of global temperatures will kill far more birds and bring about more extinctions than any bout of weather, however Dickensian.

Strife for life

In the meantime, welcome to the Hitchcockian splendours of my frozen East Anglian garden. This is always a popular sport, with three bird tables, feeders of various kinds into double figures and places for ground-feeders: and there is always stuff that can be stolen from chickens and horses as well.

Over the past week or so, it's been a frenzy of non-stop action. I'd like to boast of all kinds of exotic species but - apart from the odd feral peacock - that's not what catches the eye. And though there are goldfinches and greenfinches, and all manner of small common birds, it's the big stuff that startles.

This is a rural rather than an urban feeding station, and rooks visit in big black crowds, wielding their bone-coloured armaments, a face that seems all beak, wearing ill-fitting black suits and looking like vultures. Jackdaws, smaller crows, fit in around them. Burly wood pigeons come and go as they please, while collared doves nip in when they are elsewhere. The ground is covered in blackbirds, mostly cocks, so that the earth itself seems black.

And all is strife and tension and stand-off. Big birds see off medium birds while medium birds see off little birds, who sneak back in when no one is looking. It is a scene of constant action, fight and flight, threat and counter-threat. The constant theme is backing down in a great whirring of feathers. Look at it, and one would think: ah yes, red in beak and wing.

But this is Bird Table Error. It is a vast shared food source and it creates an unnatural situation. Each bird has adapted for a different, non-clashing way of making a living, but a bird table changes all the rules. It brings into conflict birds that would never otherwise come each other's way. Hence the whirring and the bad vibes. But it's still the best way to help birds in hard times: the opportunity for strife is the opportunity for life.

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