"Something daring that I like to do at this time of year is to go out without putting on my coat or gloves or any other protection against the elements and walk the thirty or so yards to the bottom of our drive to bring in the morning paper from a little box on a post.
Now you might say that that doesn't sound very daring at all, and in a sense you would be right because it only takes about twenty seconds there and back, but here is the thing that makes it special: sometimes I hang around out there just to see how long I can stand the cold.
I don't want to sound boastful, but I have devoted much of my life to testing the tolerance to extremes of the human body, often with very little thought to the potential long-term peril to myself - for instance, allowing a leg to go fast asleep in a cinema and then seeing what happens if I try to go for popcorn, or wrapping an elastic band around my index finger to see if I can make it explode. It is through this work that I have made some important breakthroughs, notably the discovery that very host surfaces don't necessarily look hot, and that temporary amnesia can be reliably induced by placing the head immediately beneath an open drawer.
I expect your instinct is to regard such behaviour as foolhardy, but let me remind you of all those occasions when you yourself stuck a finger into a small flame just to see what would happen (and what exactly did happen, eh?) or stood first on one leg and then on the other in a scalding bath waiting for an inflow of cold water to moderate the temperature, or sat at a kitchen table quietly absorbed with letting melted candle wax drip onto your fingers, or a great deal else I could mention.
At least when I engage in these matters it is in a spirit of serious scientific enquiry. Which is why, as I say, I like to go for the morning paper in the least encumbering apparel that decency and Mrs Bryson will allow.
This morning when I set off it was minus 19 Fahrenheit (minus 28 Celsius) out there - cold enough to reconfigure the anatomy of a brass monkey, as I believe the saying has it. Unless you have a particularly vivid imagination, or are reading this in a chest freezer, you may find such extreme chilliness difficult to conceive. So let me tell you just how cold it is: very.
When you step outside in such weather, for the first instant it is startlingly invigorating - not unlike the experience of diving into cold water, a sort of wake-up call to every corpuscle. But that phase passes quickly. Before you have trudged a few yards your face feels as it would after a sharp slap, your extremities are aching, and every breath you take hurts. By the time you return to the house your fingers and toes are throbbing with a gentle but insistent pain and you notice with interest that your cheeks yield no sensation at all. The little residual heat you brought from the house is long gone, and your clothes have ceased to have any insulating value. It is decidedly uncomfortable.
Nineteen degrees below zero is unusually cold even for northern New England, so I was interested to see how long I could bear such an exposure, and the answer was thirty-nine seconds. I don't mean that that's how long it took for me to get bored with the idea, or to think, Gracious, it is rather chilly; I guess I'll go in now. I mean that's how long it took me to be so cold that I would have climbed over my mother to get inside first..."

(Bill Bryson: Notes from a big country)