DARK SIDE OF THE MOON @ 50

We had a copy at home. It was in the cabinet beneath the turntable in the stereo system that my dad built for us. The system was a massive 3 in 1 (turntable, radio, cassette deck) and was a triumph of Dad's skills with carpentry and electronics. Two massive speakers in the front and two more mounted to the walls at the rear of the rumpus room. I thought that made it quadraphonic, just adding a couple of speakers, but it was only the same stereo field as the front. It did sound big, though. There were LPs in that cabinet that proved how big the sound was and how cleverly done stereo records could be (mostly synthesiser cover versions of classical and pop songs with a lot of panning effects) with cover art that looked like stills from sci-fi tv shows. Oh, Pink Floyd. Right.

So, you would think that, growing up marvelling at big sounding stereo that could be played as big as you liked in a place far enough away from the neighbours that no one would complain, that a record celebrated for the brilliance of its execution would be a local hit. I can honestly say that, even though the album had seemed to have been there for the balance of time, I had never heard it. This was in the mid '70s when the album was only about three years old but that was as long as I'd got into rock music from a bigot-grade love of classical music. So we should have been friends. I'd forced myself into rock music after I started high school for survival reasons and, while I could happily sit through Countdown every weekend, my itch for something more developed sent me back to the late '60s for inspiration.

I could claim that I found out that Pink Floyd had a crazy genius at the helm in the psychedelic era whom they cast out to become a stadium monolith was the reason for not choosing to listen to the record but I'd be lying. It was just that little bit out of my scope, enough to join The Faces, Slade, Humble Pie, Canned Heat and a host of others in the deaf spot shelf. Also, none of my elders talked about them. That made me wonder where this copy had come from. I could think of one brother and one sister who might have left it there but neither of those ever mentioned it or anything else about Pink Floyd. Had my father bought it to demonstrate the strength of his homebuilt marvel? He might have heard about its audio excellence which would have appealed to him but all that stuff about the futility of the salary man in the modern world really wouldn't have had him singing along after toking on a blunt. Dad barely drank alcohol and had given up cigarettes before I was born, so it wasn't him, either. I wondered if it just appeared in record collections everywhere through spooring.

Once, I gave it the stylus sampler routine. I'd get the record rolling and drop the needle gently for a few seconds of every track to see if anything stood out. There was some jangle, droning synthesisers, saxes and a woman screaming. Not for me. No, this is not a fair test of anything. I'd done the same thing to my brother Michael's copy of the White Album and declared it dull before a few kids at school found it in their family collections and started whisper campaigns that led me straight to it. Dark Side of the Moon didn't have that demographic. That would have to wait until those kids were old enough to beg their own tokes off their more worldly siblings and hail the disc as a religious experience. That was after punk happened and I wasn't going to ask a hippy for directions to anywhere.

To the end of high school and beyond it through university in a different town, the album was jeered as the work of dinosaurs. A music press that acted younger than its age and the kind of taunting that happened among musicians in the local band scene effectively barred the record from the curious listener under the age of twenty-five. So, after decades of ignoring it but enjoying other Pink Floyd albums like Meddle, I Napstered Dark Side and then bought it on CD for real. Then I bought the SACD to have it in surround sound and listened to it on something like a monthly basis. More recently, I bought the Blu-Ray with the Atmos mix. The higher res you get with this one, the more deluxe it gets. Not just as a demonstration of sumptuous audio but as a deathless concept album, one of the few that works as well as it did to its original listeners (let alone one that worked well at all). And it goes like this:

A heartbeat approaches through the dark. Other sounds slide in around it in the stereo field. Running footfalls, clockwork bells and whirrs, a thick synthesiser doing doppler passes, metallic clinks and clanks and then over a reversed piano chord, a woman screaming with escalating horror. The cacophony rages until ...

The heavenly arpeggiated chords of David Gilmour's Stratocaster, heavily phased, burst in and bring us to the surface of the opening song and as we float upon the easy motion he sings: Breathe, breath in the air. Don't be afraid to care..." Sounds nice until the lyric moves us towards the difference between experiencing life and merely living it with the promise of an early grave. The song alternates between the buoyant verse and a slightly more strident chorus but if you're not paying attention, it will just feel like opiation. And that is the album in short. Some songs match the aggression lyrics to music but most of it mixes smooth fluidity with thoughts of struggle, insanity and death.

On the Run is an instrumental but really more of a soundscape. The running feet and shortness of breath cross the sound field as that travelling synthesiser growls back and forth until it sounds like vehicles, helicopters or aeroplanes. Underneath a busy electronic bubbling persists, constant, urgent. The heartbeat reappears with laughter and what could be a distant gale or bombing. A final pass of the electronic plane sounds like it's swooping in aggression. Then the near silence after the shock.

Ticking is interrupted by a loud burst of clanging, bells and tolls as timepieces announce the next concept. Then a series of gigantic bass notes. Two notes on the Strat's low E string supported by Waters' Precision bass and synthesis, a massive tolling bell. An electric piano answers these high on the board until the bluesy shouting rocker starts with Gilmour in big voice declaiming the futility of time. A chorus calms it down with Rick Wright's clean and clear vocals. This works well until you realise, again, that both musical sides are saying the same thing. the last line before the briefly reprised Breathe is "the time has gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say" which still grinds, especially as it's sung in Wright's gentle voice, so easy on the ear.

Wright is the initial star of the next track, The Great Gig in the Sky which begins with a spacey piano figure, joined by an easy bass and Gilmour's ethereal lap steel (and another of the many spoken word recordings, this time about fear of death) which rises as the piano intensifies, the drums begin and the track's real star emerges in the form of Clare Torry's vocals. These wordless improvisations almost seem to go through the five stages of grief until they just sound like bargaining and fear, impassioned, pitch perfect but also raw and penetrating, Torry rises to the unbounded scream of horror heard in the opening overture. Now, in context, it sounds both more musical and unrestrained. After this, and a woman's voice telling us that she said she didn't fear death, Torry's vocal falls and assumes the TS Eliot whimper appropriate to this album as the piano eases to softness and silence. End of side one.

A strident musique concrete rhythm sequence opens the second side with sound of coins jingling, money bags dropping, cash registers ringing. an old adding machine rattling, all in a tight loop. When the thick picked bass comes in you get that something's been wrong from the off. Though the riff is bluesy, this is no four on the four twelve bar. The verses of this song are played in 7/8. It flows but try dancing to it. Gilmour's vocal is shouted and cool, giving a jivey ode of hatred to greed. Because he couldn't play his solo in that time signature, Gilmour interpolated a 4/4 section and filled it with first a fiery turn and then a dry, more sobering staccato finish before the sax gets a blasting go and then, in an old Yardbirds gallop it finds its way back to the 7/8 verse. The tracks fade begins more voice samples in, including the woman from Great Gig (Naomi Watts's mother, btw) talking about a fight she got in. And then something even more violent from one of their roadies.

This retreating storm gives way to soothing organ chords and more of Gilmour's headache-curing broken chords. This is joined by a jazzier and bereezier sax than on Money. Gilmour comes in with his voice on calm to sing about Us and Them. It's a meditation on lifelong futility and the depression that can build around that to ease pain by smothering. The chorus sections are harder and fuller but mixed distant to allow for both a tonal difference and ease of transition. Also, their relative quietness expresses the kind of emotional compression. While they prevent the song from being all comfortable numbness you could turn yourself off at a few points and float like you did with Breathe.

A final distraught chorus breaks to reveal Any Colour You Like, a gorgeous synthesiser improvisation by Wright that does in a few minutes what the likes of fellow proggers Genesis or ELP would have taken a side to play. Gilmour takes over in a kind of staccato non-solo, a kind of funk for the mental facility. Wright re-enters to save the track from dementia with more of the beautiful synth from the opening.

The track calms to the guitar arpeggio of Brain Damage (D to G7 but it sounds like major to minor) lilting before Waters comes in with his indefatigably English voice to tell us that the lunatic is on the grass. After a chorus that gives us the album title in a line the insistent guitar figure returns with another spooky vocal augmented by a demented laugh (by Naomi Watts's father, btw). The next chorus is bigger and benefits from Clare Torry's second appearance. An instrumental verse with voice samples and more of the last tracks lovely synth and, also wordless, another chorus and we're straight into the album's coda, Eclipse. The full band in chorus, with Torry and lists of life experiences as packages ("all that you love and all the you hate") are drawn as one into the lunar eclipse of the madness of the whole damn thing. We lead out on the heartbeat that led us in and the Irish doorman from Abbey Road Studios who tells us that there's no dark side of the moon as it's all dark. Boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom.

By which time, if you have, as you should, listened to this all the way through without a break, you are left stunned with a strange elation that, after all this sorry observation you share the planet with this music. What helps you out there is the same thing would have helped out way back in 1973: the facelessness of Pink Floyd. The poster that came with the original LP included photos of all four members but they were of little help. They were swathed in stage lights, clear featured but really just a quartet of long haired blokes. This was Ziggy Stardust's time, flamboyance reigned and the glittering divas of the new rock paraded through tours, generating uncountable glamour photos. Even the prog rockers, like Genesis with their million costume changes or ELP with E's literally inflammable performances or Yes's medieval electric splendour, were joining in. Pink Floyd walked on stage in jeans an T-shirts and let the lights do the magic. It would've been like crowding around to hear the record with thousands of others all at once. They might as well have been their own roadies.

What this means is that when you heard a Floyd record it was really just you and the music and the increasingly sharp observations of life, the universe and the rest of it. While there was warmth and humanity to all of it, however angry it could get, it wasn't served up as Mick Jagger's strut or Ozzie Osborne's demonism, it was just a suite of songs about real things delivered with clear definition and care. This is why you can listen as freshly in 2023 as the first fans did fifty years ago. The statements still stick. Sure, no one plays blues based guitar solos like that any more but those things only prevent this music from the kiss of death that comes with being written off as timeless. It is the '70s quality of the record that lets us marvel. It is the failure of the world to improve beyond these accusations that sober the listener. That's why when you hear the latest attempt by a subsequently formed band to emulate this statement they will just sound like they're playing musical dressups.

Where does that put Roger Waters' re-recording of the album with the voice of the accumulated wisdom of the decades. It puts it with Roger Waters, he can do what he wants with what he has. The only thing he won't be able to do is eclipse this.

But I don't want to end with a downer. If you are reading this while still young, please take the time to find a continuous sequence of this whole album, whether on vinyl, legit download, streaming or any physical medium. Take the time and take care to sit in front of it in the dark. It's less than an hour of your life and you will thank yourself for the act of it. And then, you can get up and go for a round of dodgeball for all I care because it's less this particular record than any like it that can compel you to stop and listen and think about your life. It's not the only one, it's just one of the best.

Listening notes: to really get into this before writing, I immersed myself in the recently released standalone blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos mix which is completely sumptuous. For more local references to moments like fades or moments of voice material. I played sections of the original stereo mix form the '90s CD. This album is pretty much everywhere so you have no excuse.

1968 at 50: A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS - PINK FLOYD

Calling a famous band's album transitional is almost a guarantee that most fans will drop it after a single listen, if that. We want to hear all of our favourite music at full strength. Some, like New Order's Movement or Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy can get repatriated by the fanbase over time. But Pink Floyd, who really only made transitional albums between Piper and Meddle seem doomed to a section of its timeline as lost years. If you listen from Piper onwards you will hear nothing but continuity building to a clear development. Then again, when you have and then suddenly don't have one of rock history's great human enigmas that can kind of get in the way. So, this is a post-Syd album (even though he's on it) in a way that Obscured by Clouds or Atom Heart Mother aren't. Until that's dealt with the record gets slotted into the post Morrison Doors albums as a curio for the completist. But there's a lot more here than that.

Let There be More Light opens with a pacy R&B guitar riff weirded by a chromatic organ wash. It settles into a half pace thud before Waters enters with his soft vocals in a chant that breaks into a more panic-ed acid rock blast. And back and on. It's a sci-fi story of an alien race descending on earth to inspire us to evolve. After a namecheck of the Beatle's Lucy the track continues to a fairly formless instrumental fade that cannot peak.

Remember a Day features Syd on slide which adds worlds of atmosphere. Ex-Beatles engineer Norman Smith, returning to produce from Piper provides the tom tom thump that Nick Mason couldn't arrive at which lends a solid loping quality. A cinematic piano part is gently lowered on top by Rick Wright who also lends his smooth and airy vocal to this song about childrens' play and imagination. This is the song from the album that appeared on the Relics compilation and, until the record rose from its obscurity as half of a twofer (A Nice Pair) to a decades later release in its own right, was the sole evidence of the set. The eerie beauty of it promised an album composed entirely of it but it's the only moment like it here.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun begins with a murmuring bass line, ceremonial tom toms, vibraphone and a near whispered vocal fro mWaters. The cryptic lyric suggests a kind of legendary link between the ancient world and space travel (but really it might as well just be nice phrases following each other). There's no real development to this one but the atmospherics from the continued interplay of the organ, bass and whispered repetition of the phrase "the heart of the sun" give it a dark and pleasing flow. This is the only track that all five members played on. That doesn't mean they were all there at the same session (it was recorded between Piper and this one with Syd and finished off with Gilmour).

Corporal Clegg bursts to life as a guitar heavy dose of psychedelia mixing yelling guitars and a theatrically nasty lead vocal (Nick Mason in his only sung vocal in the band's recording output). The irony of wartime heroism and the personal devastation it wrought in families is typical of the themes of late '60s Britpop where the creative controls had been given to the bands themselves instead of their management. We go from Clegg's pathetic achievement to a choral presentation of his mother's gin-soaked pride to a kazoo-heavy knees-up. Overlong but well played and mark-hitting.

 The title track begins after you've given up listening for it and then lifts into a sci-fi landscape of chromatic organ shimmers and low level noise. This fades under a rising tribal tom tom onslaught which brings its own atonal soundscape. That folds under a lengthy choral and wonky noise fest which closes with a major third. This might have been avant-rock but it was already well behind progressions in orchestral music like Stockhausen's or the freer jazz movements and, even within the greater rock area, already snagged by the like of Zappa and Beefheart. For all that it's an easy twelve minutes of atmosphere  created by well engineered recording. Like Interstellar Overdrive on the debut this was a kind of mid point between the jamming live shows and the freedom of the studio. If the tale it told had no plot that wasn't going to stop the band revisiting this territory and would take years and albums until the sublime Echoes on 1971's Meddle established the strengths of blending explorative textures with confident musicianship. For now it was the bit of the album where the tab you took on side one kicked in and every squeak and thrung made perfect sense.

See Saw shimmers with jazz chords, piano, vibes, mellotron, the big late '60s bass and guitar. Rick Wright's pleasant lead vocals (like Syd in a torpor). Siblings growing up and drifting apart after the closeness of the realm of the family. Occasional jazzy interventions in the rhythm never jar and the flow is maintained. While the lyric lifts it above a mood piece the swamp of audio effects like flanging, tremolo and massive reverb keep this one in the late '60s never to emerge. You can hear the way to great gig in the sky but it's too buried in its times.

And now we must address it, the Effervescing Elephant in the room. Jugband Blues is the only obvious indication that Syd Barrett was still there. From its stark opening with guitar and echoey vocals, through a thumping refrain to a real Salvation Army band and back down to a fragmented mess this is a capsule of Syd's progress from the cheery wit of the opening about him being there but not being there to rhymes that sound like he's making them up on the spot. Then there's a brief wistful moment where he seems lost and then there's a ragged jolly bit about not caring and then the Salvation Army band comes in with a splodgy refrain and then there's a wandering psychedelic dissonance which ends as though cut with a scapel. After a little silence the acoustic guitar drifts back in with Syd asking questions and ending on: "And what exactly is a joke." He's not smiling. He means it. Does that make it funny? We're left with silence. Nothing like the self appreciative calls and laughter that would interlard the White Album later in the year which told listeners that everyone should be in on it. But here it's nothing, the same silence that Syd heard the evening that the rest of the band decided not to pick him up on the way to the gig.

And then it's over and the wild-eyed scarecrow with the fright wig has left the building, stumbling without direction into forty years of night. Actually, Syd heads off back to his Chelsea loft and paints. And strums chords and writes lyrics, recording two LPs that veer from brilliance to distintegration before he heads back home to Cambridge and his family who help him manage his schizophrenia. The rest of the band, to their eternal credit, ensure that he is looked after financially, getting a guernsey on every Floyd compilation album and royalties from his songs they still play live. Invaded by journalists and then knuckle-headed fans who are quick with cameras but slow with learning about privacy he goes to the shop and makes bizarre furniture in his house and then dies at sixty, affluent and voluntarily obscure. The record label keeps releasing legacy-violating albums of outtakes and failures from the Black Lagoon but anyone who loves a bit of Syd leaves them in the shop.

After that The Pink Floyd becomes just Pink Floyd and they get into it, experimenting and carving off everything that fails until you get to Meddle's crafted songs and epic and then the one that hangs them on the stars of the firmament, Dark Side, after which time they will be able to endure the ridicule of the punks and indifference of the post punks and receive visits from the newly curious for evermore. But for a moment here there was real conflict and through a couple of LP sides of assured psychedelia you can hear the instant of severance, the cracking of execution and the silence that made the promise.

1967 at 50: PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN - PINK FLOYD

Some time in the late seventies I got mum to impulse buy a book called Rock Life. It was a series of articles about some of the more towering figures of British rock. Vintage 1973 it featured ex Beatles (and only John and Paul) and focused on the central figures of big acts like Pete Townshend or Ray Davies. While not deep it was a great primer for me to go hunting for records. I was aware of most of the bands but it being the time and I being my age the spectre of Pink Floyd was one of the chapters I left to last (see also Van Morrison). When I did it was to encounter the most sustained description of Syd Barrett I'd come across. He was loopy, unpredictable and left a great mark. There was a photo of him with the band. They were lined up on bleachers at different heights like a school photo. It was a rare picture of the five piece that included Dave Gilmour. Syd was miles away, eyes like the black coals in Crazy Diamond, hair so unkempt it looked like it had matted in the shape the wind had blown it. He looked dangerous, infectious, as though his gaze alone would afflict you. I wanted to be that.

As with Revolver I found a copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn among the collections of friends of siblings. Christmas holidays 1978-9. A mild summer that tasted of scotch and dry and sounded like Elvis Costello. As that might suggest, the afternoon I put it on and listened in headphones in the rumpus room downstairs is golden with nostalgia. I'll end that here.

Astonomie Dominie opens with what sounds like mission control radio voices (but are really band members unless Houston employed an unmistakably Cambridge plum voice at some point in the psychedelic era) that give way to the lift off of palm muted bass and guitar. A wash of vocal harmonies adds light as a choir of Barrettian word play suggests interplanetary travel. A big chromatic riff descends with a strangely merged organ and vocal falsetto. The instrumental centre of the song assumes its station smoothly without sounding like a solo that will last an average three zone bus trip. But there really are no solos here as much as lightly explored textures. Imagine an English Beach Boys (the accents are uncompromisingly non-American) from the Smile era.

Lucifer Sam is the coolest song ever written to a cat with a spy movie guitar riff. Syd's Fender Esquire tones are really beautiful on this one, clean but hot, chiming and ringing. The vocals are close harmony but there's no esoterica like the last song, it's all London rock and roll. And under all the banging and ringing there's a strange warm flutey part that might be an organ or even a mellotron.

Matilda Mother begins with a white light organ note beaming through a descending bass line which comes to a soft landing as Syd's vocal starts, a single note insisting over a descent telling what sounds like a children's bedtime story about a king who ruled a land. The harmony chorus comes in with the child's plea, "oh, mother, tell me more". But then a sour double time minor figure coupled in the vocal asks why she leaves him. From here we swing between the wonder in the child's mind (including huge fantastical landscapes in the instrumental section) and the corner of dejection between story time and dreams with only the nightlight for cheer against the dark. Seekers of the early signs of Syd's affliction might find riches here but it's really pretty straightforward and imaginative rather than deranged.

A dissonant drone on the organ begins Flaming like an electric engine. Syd chirps in with the whimsy of a Cambridge riverside picnic and answered by a loopy recorder. Playfully spying on a friend he sings of the joy of hiding and watching but then we're travelling by telephone and screaming through the starlit sky as his daydreams send him soaring. This song, beginning as electrically as it does surprises us by letting a clean wide acoustic guitar provide the bedrock. The winsome, cheeky melody returns after an instrumental section of tacked pianos and electro manipulation, ever rising. Pure psychedelic charm.

Pow R Toc H starts with a muffled thump answered by a bass and series of vocal sounds like ch-ch or a falsetto-ed doy-doy and settles into a brisk jazz workout which intensifies into something more jammy and psychedelic. I don't skip it anymore but I'd never go straight to it.

Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk bangs in with a beat band chordy rock backing to a call and response vocal of a whispered "doctor doctor" and series of thin harmony vocals saying things like "gold is red". The organ comes in and meanders. Some whispered vocals here and there. Don't skip this either, mostly. Roger Waters' first byline for the band. Well, he made up for it.

Interstellar Overdrive bashes straight into the big descending riff, repeating it until its exhausted then intentionally collapsing into a series of more spacey passages. Clearly an adaptation of a longer live workout that is suggested by the recording without too much insistence, leaving it feeling half baked rather than condensed. Unless I'm really concentrating on something I'm doing while listening, I'll skip this one.

The tick tock rhythm and octave used more effectively in the later See Emily Play starts the Gnome before Syd enters in children's lit mode, somewhere posher than Ray Davies in bucolic operation. Twee but gets away with it. It's Syd.

Chapter 24 couches Syd's voice in oboes and other orchestral intruments as he guides us through the i-ching. Rick Wright's keyboards take up the oboe as Syd's vocals get expanded by masses of reverb. Strong melody and lovely harmonies allow me to forget the cod mysticism (a tautology for me).

A click clack start with an oboe floating in the air around the harvest bonfire as Syd comes in with a serpentine melody fleshed out with slightly creepy descriptions of a scarecrow that a child might offer. The fadeout features a beautiful acoustic twelve string figure enriched by bowed basses and an ever more buoyant oboe. A miniature of pure beauty.

"I've got a bike, you can ride if you like..." Syd channels his prepubescent self at the moment of awakening as these big happy declarations over the clashing and hammering alternate with the half spoken: "you're the kind of girl who fits in with my world. I'll get you anything, everything if you want thing." This is delivered over a loopy theremin either rising or falling the way that crazy people in cartoons or thrillers sound. Finally, after verses about gingerbread men, a mouse called Gerald the finale is about a room filled with musical tunes most of which are clockwork. Then we suddenly plunge into that very thing with clicks and tocks , hammering, chimes, tools, a whole workshop of hitting and ringing which is overcome by a rising loop of something that could be a squeeze toy sound, bird call or a sped up voice that sounds more sinister with every repetition until it, too, fades. Actually, it sounds very similar in character to the run out groove loop of Sgt Pepper which was being recorded in the next studio at the time by Norman Smith's old boss George Martin.

Smith did a lot to curb the band's live act from taking over, directing them through take after take of numbers like Interstellar Overdrive that would work as a recording. Here's the problem, though: a side of that would have sounded like Pink Floyd the way their audience knew them, trippy and exploring, but a recognition and pursuit of Barrett's melodic gifts and strange childlike lyrics presented something far more accessible and individual. The record doesn't recover from the the tension of these contrary forces. Syd's vocal songs sound like he's backed by a band rather than a band in total (unlike the comparable Kinks) and the jamming sections never quite lift off which editing in post might have allowed. The epic promised by Astronomy Domine with its radio calls and surge into outer space is not sustained.

So, why do I still like the album? Well, while I've never quite got to the point of listening to the ones I'd skip with renewed vigour I can let the whole thing happen now. More pointedly, I will dive into the sequences of Syd-centric numbers which are psychedelic by association rather than at core. But that's it for me, an album of good bits between dull ones. Norman Smith seemed to find a path to working with the band more effectively as evinced by the singles See Emily Play and Apples and Oranges and the post Barrett albums Saucer Full of Secrets and Ummagumma. Until then there was this uneasy collision between the band as a practicing unit and a backdrop to its singer which prevent it from the cohesion that the band would soon be pursuing without fear or favour.

Syd's story is better known now than it was and the band's tale is part of rock dinosaur legend. Speculation about a version of history where he continued contributing is answered easily by Jugband Blues and the solo albums which, while often inspiring, can terrify by their unfocused wandering. Whatever Syd's condition was that separated him from the rest of the world his messy exit continued for years of decreasingly effective creative attempts. The rest of the band recruited an old friend who joined them in the stratosphere. Before that there was this awkward child who could recite Wind in the Willows as thought he'd written it himself but also who could stare at his shoes for whole afternoons without noticing how cold it had become.