Frozen Arizona

Winter in southern Arizona is usually the perfect place to escape the British winter, but this year sees frozen water pipes and cactus covered in snow.

When we come to Arizona for the winter, we leave the heating on in our house back in England. The landlords insist on it. A few years ago a previous tenant didn't bother, and didn't switch the water off either. He left for several weeks, the temperature dropped below zero, a pipe in the attic froze and then burst. For several days water poured from the attic and down through the house. The landlords were not happy bunnies. So we leave the heating on and the water off. Still, in Arizona we don't need to worry about such things.

Where we live, south of Tucson, it's a desert climate. And deserts get cold at night. It often drops below freezing, when we cover our jade plant for protection against frost. Walk round the neighbourhood and where you once saw lemon trees you now see what appear to be sheet bushes. One back garden normally full of small shrubs looks like a Ku Klux Klan convention.

The other morning we woke up after a freezing night to find we had no water. I rang the neighbour to see if their supply was affected, but everyone else had water. He's quite a handyman so came over to take a look. He checked there was water coming into the house, that there wasn't a leak, then paced round the house, inside and out, trying to figure out what the problem could be.

He was baffled. He rang a plumber friend, who was equally puzzled. A frozen pipe, maybe? A third call was coming to the same conclusion when we heard gurgling in the pipes. Water began flowing. The problem? Round the back of the house there was a section of water pipe about six inches long which wasn't insulated against the cold. It must have frozen overnight, but thankfully didn't burst. It just needed to warm up a little for the water to start flowing again.

Later, down at the hardware store, the aisles were filled with people buying long tubes of insulation. There were dozens of them waving in the air. It looked like an alien invasion. As we paid, the guy in front of us said he'd heard it had been the coldest night since the early 1960s. It was colder than… Good grief. It had been colder than England! A few days later it was snowing. Life sometimes just ain't fair. Welcome to frozen Arizona.