"Winter Holiday" (1933) is the fourth Swallows and Amazons book by Arthur Ransome. This book is again set in the Lake District, but this time in the winter holidays where nothing ever happens yet everything does. This book introduces Dick and Dorothy Callum as new children into the series.

This book contains some wonderful passages, the signalling to Mars, the journey to the North Pole, the houseboat frozen in on the lake. And not forgetting the rescued sheep on a ledge, and the new sledge. And the use of semaphore codes which remind me of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Dancing Men".

It was this book that introduced me to polar explorers like Nansen in his "Fram". But for me this book above the others is like a window onto a long-lost time where ice yachts would race over the frozen lakes. Where children could have adventures safely. A time now long gone to us and not just because of global warming.