Trust the Scots to come up with the weirdest things, like eating haggis, and when you’ve had your fill of that, you put on your ice boots and start throwing rocks across the ice. Curling, they call it. Sort of like horseshoes, but with rocks, on ice. The Scots have tried to export curling, but with very little success. Canada, however, took to it, hook, line and sinker. Oh, those Canadians, eh!
Curling never caught on in the States, because you want it to be cold, really cold if you’re going to curl. Any sport that requires you to throw rocks across the ice and then slide across the ice in pursuit of those rocks requires frigid temps. There’s a bit more to the sport, including yelling Hard! HARD!! HARD!!! (for my Canadian and Scots friends), but suffice to say, you want good, thick, solid ice under you if you’re going to be throwing rocks and sliding back and forth on it. Falling through a crack in the ice does not earn you additional points. So that means you need cold, minus 20 degrees kind of cold, for the sport.
In very cold Scotland, before you eat your haggis and head off for a day of curling, you’ll want to start your day with a hurkle durkle. For the uninitiated, what it is, is when you wake up in the morning to a cold room and then snuggle up under your warm blankets and just lie there, doing nothing, when you really ought to be up and getting going. That’s hurkle durkling.
There’s no truth to the story that the Scots invented hurkle durkle to give the non-curlers among them something to do. That one is a sport that requires skill and the other is, at best, an activity, is the biggest differentiator. The one thing key to both, though, is the cold. It’s got to be cold to hurkle durkle. Lying in bed bundled up under the duvet in Fargo is the real deal. Lounging around in bed in the morning in Louisiana is just plain lazy. Which is no insult. Get up too fast in New Orleans and you’ll get yourself a heat cramp.
Nope. Hurkle durkling is reserved for cold-weather climes. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid growing up in the frozen tundra of Canada. My mother believed that fresh air was good for sleeping. No matter the temperature. If it was 20 below, it meant you only opened the window a crack. I had no choice but to hurkle durkle every morning with only my nose sticking out from the blankets. It was my favorite time of the day, interrupted only by my mother opening my bedroom door and telling me to get up, lazy bones. That’s hurkle durkle bones to you, Mom.
For your listening pleasure, the Allman Brothers Band …
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