The Birds In The Meadow

It’s a stereotype that we Brits (and the English in particular) are prone to banging on about the weather in minute detail; I’m here to tell you that not only is this stereotype an accurate one, but that as I am nothing if not a product of the country I live in I feel compelled to join in.

The recent weather in London (and much of the British Isles) has been unusually worthy of comment - it’s been a late, cold and stormy spring with fearsome, sudden thunderstorms, flooding, blustery winds and barely a sunny day to leaven the gloom. This was followed by an unexpectedly glorious week of May sunshine, balmy enough to make “flaming June” fling down her parasol in a jealous sulk. Well now it’s all back to normal - colourless skies and a light, relentless drizzle. I love it.

The extremes we’ve been experiencing lately are not how I remember our spring or summer weather. Forgive the nostalgia, but the weather of my childhood was, on the whole, gentle and uneventful - some would say dull and mediocre. The picture to your left, taken today, sums up the typical quality of light as I remember it. Sun was fleeting and pleasant, occasionally hot enough to burn; rain was gentle and always to be expected. Breezes would spring up in Autumn - but gales? Once a decade perhaps, and never forgotten. We are the country famous for trains that stop running when autumn leaves fall, despite our having seen leaves falling every year at approximately the same time for thousands of years, and where heavy snow sees the country grind to a somewhat festive halt as everybody takes the day off to go tobogganing. What people in other countries would take for granted as good weather is enough of a novelty for us that we become notoriously skittish should the sun appear for more than an hour; we shed our clothes, inhibitions and dignity with heady abandon. Our weather is like pick-n-mix; you get a tiny little bit of everything and very, very occasionally something exciting. We don’t do extreme weather.

Except that more often these days, we are having to. We are left bewildered in the aftermath of mini hurricanes, dramatic, almost biblical floods followed by drought, crop failures, sun fierce enough to burn our pasty British skins within the hour. At last, thanks to global warming, we have weather worth gossiping about. Areas of land are to be given up to the sea, like pagan sacrifice, in the hopes of better flood defences. There are places where you might not get insurance on your home, because of the threat of flooding. More subtle but just as telling is the creep of malarial and other disease harbouring insects into southern Britain, and the slow inevitable drift of cold loving species forced further and further north, until what - they just fall off the map? I know that we are the lucky ones here on our temperate little islands - we have had no earthquake or cyclone to fell us in our thousands - and I am fervently greatful at times like this to live in such a kindly, comparatively stable climate. That is why I love our gently miserable summer drizzle. It is home, it is what I’m used to. Freakish weather - you can keep it.