Category: Weather
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The season’s change brings joy
Finally, as the end of September clambers into reach, it feels like autumn here high up in these North Pennines. The sun still shines with warmth, and the sky is still blue, even though the winds have started up again after the prolonged respite during the hot summer. It’s the beginning of the end for…
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Luxury of warmth
It was down to 2º outside last night. The auguries for a hard winter are becoming impossible to ignore, and so many people are facing complete destitution, having to choose between eating or heating, or neither. How, one might ask, can we be complacent in our delight at the warmth we may personally experience, when…
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Family stories . . .
Images can capture a lifetime of memories in s single frame. My mother loved her family’s ‘sugar bush’ and she conveyed, onto a canvas, her childhood experience of maple sap collection and its semi-magical rendering into syrup. I think she used a postcard of a late winter scene from a farm near Toronto as her…
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Blackberry season
With any luck, if the sun shines this afternoon, after we’re diligent with a bit of house cleaning chores, and locally-contributive with a visit to a Producers’ Market, we’ll take a little amble into the New Galloway edge of the Ken-Dee Marshes on a blackberry forage. We’ve been promising ourselves, for some time, that we’d…
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Real good rain
I read a column the other day decrying our obsession with bright sunny days as ‘good’ . . . and dark rainy ones as, well, as something to be endured. But in this summer of extensive drought, and with climate harbingers sounding ever more doom-laden, real good rain is something to be cheered, surely, the…
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Solace of a morning mist
The unconscionable challenges of the Barnvelder cockerel were incessant, this morning, so that by 5:55 we turned around and agreed that we might as well get up. My awaking duty is to get the water on for the tea. I might not have noticed, in my own sleepy haze, that the mist had settled across…
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Persevering flowers
High up on the fellside of Sparty Lea, you’ve got to be tough to survive. That adage is true for birds, animals, plants and even humans. But if you do manage to withstand the constant wind, the lowered temperatures that altitude brings, and the frozen winters, then you may find, like these persevering plants, that…
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Good morning, blue sky
It’s no wonder that the seeresses of old used a crystal ball to peer into the future. The reflection of the blue sky beyond the clouds in our glass conservatory table this morning seems to offer a new perspective to the dawn. New perspectives seem to be an incredible stimulus. I know one writer who…
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Very wet today . . . lovely!
A couple days ago I clocked a column headline that gave me pause, and this morning I returned to Ian Jack’s piece and read it carefully. He explains, with some precision, why we need a new story about the ‘glorious’ weather construct that we put on sunny days. To which I would add, after a…
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Oh we do love to be beside the seaside . . .
Early Monday morning, everyone is struggling to wake up and pack up for the off, after a delightful weekend of fish and chips, pizzas, and then a complete Sunday dinner. Food and drinks have been in copious supply, just like the sunshine. It seems the whole country was filled with sunshine, actually, as the reports…
Roads to Joy 