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On the other hand…

May 20, 2013 in Life as we know it, Photos | Permalink

OK – so there are two possible explanations for the preceding and somewhat grouchy post on the subject of the current state of the British weather… The first is that my natural optimism had temporarily deserted me – prompted in no small part by the dogged insistence of our forecasters that the immediate future – in meteorological terms if no other – looked grim. The second is that I was actually practicing a subtle form of climatic voodoo – the intention being to goad the weather gods into an antithetical response. If this latter were indeed the case… well, it worked like a charm!

Contrary to all of the forecasts – including those on the day itself – the clouds cleared from the sky, the wind dropped to a balmy breeze and the temperature soared by a good five degrees. The ground – previously unknown to me – was pretty as a picture. Our opponents were good-natured and sportsmanlike – and we contrived not to lose. To be entirely fair we managed only what might be considered a losing draw – a concept almost certainly completely alien to anyone not conversant with the arcane nature of the game. I will happily explain should anyone so desire…

Today – naturally – it is once again grey and cold!

Anyway – here are a few snaps…

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

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Tsk!

May 18, 2013 in Life as we know it | 2 comments

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidThe offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. 

Joseph Conrad

Just under a year ago this weekend I posted thus on the occasion of – amongst other delicious happenings – my first game of cricket of the season. I am – in theory – due to turn out for this year’s corresponding fixture this coming Sunday. As things stand I would say that the odds on the game taking place must be on the longish side – and that’s putting it mildly!

Now – I wouldn’t want to intercede in the argument between the global warmists and the climate change deniers – sorry, sceptics! – but from my entirely partial standpoint I think there can be no doubt that there is “summat oop wi’ t’weather”. (No idea why I came over all cod-northern there… Must be a hot flush or something – or a cold one, mayhap!)

At this juncture last year we had just experienced one of the dryest winters on record and dire warnings of droughts and hosepipe bans were still ringing in our ears. Had we but know it we stood on the cusp of one of the wettest summers in living memory, which intemperate season saw the cancellation of many of the great game’s fixtures at everything from national to village levels. As we now emerge, blinking, from one of the darkest winters of modern times – featuring as it did the coldest March for fifty years – we find ourselves waiting with some trepidation to see what the summer – should it ever arrive – will bring.

Thus far the omens are not propitious. With the exception of the odd – and unexpected – springlike day the temperature has struggled to creep into double figures. On the infrequent occasions that there has been some variation from the ominous grey that habitually covers the UK at this time of year the alternate fare on offer has tended to comprise bitter winds and stinging horizontal rain.

Who knows? Maybe the rain will hold off for long enough for twenty two ragged-arsed cricketers – clad between them in getting on for fifty sweaters – to brave the elements and attempt to remember why they play the game at all.

I’ll let you know…
rain

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A pictorial paucity

March 23, 2013 in Life in England | 5 comments

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidI really must apologise for the recent lamentable lack of interesting new images to accompany these posts. I can only beg your indulgence for what will doubtless be an equivocation of excuses.

As ever I carry the Fuji X10 with me every day – to work and elsewhere – looking for opportunities to record what I see and whatever tickles my fancy. However, the start of this year really has featured atmospheric and climatic conditions of such a truly dire nature that the impetus to indulge in observational lacunae has been strictly limited. In other words – the weather has been so sh*t that I can’t be ar*ed to stop to take pictures!

This time last year – as is evidenced in this post from last March – saw the UK basking in almost summer-like conditions with the temperature approaching 20C. I enjoyed a wonderful top-down drive down to the coast in Pearl on the occasion of a family funeral.

This year – as can been seen from the accompanying image – temperatures struggle to rise above zero and even the south of England is still suffering snow falls and heavy frosts. The poor daffodils look shocked and stunned and resolutely refuse to open their buds. Who can blame them? Last March was the third warmest here on record. By contrast – in some parts of the UK – last weekend was the coldest March weekend for 50 years. What’s more, there is no sign of the weather improving this side of Easter!

Bah! – and Bah again!!

Our dear friends in Saanichton report that temperatures in Victoria are up into the mid-teens – and that spring has well and truly arrived. I will do my very best just to feel happy for them – and not to be at all bitter!

How am I doing?

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Stolen songs

November 22, 2012 in Life in England | 8 comments

“It’s mornings like this;
The stingy sun trying to hold back
Even the warmth of its reflection
Flashing coldly in the lake.
When November leaves drop in sudden gusts,
Like a red and yellow flock of birds
Swooping at once to ground.
Or even nights:
When winds reach wet hands
To take you spinning with random paper
Down back street gutters, under straining bridges
To clogged rivers.
It’s this:
The time of year, along with spring,
When poets must take care
Not to sing the same old songs
Stolen from tribal memory.”

Thomas R. Drinkard

In my opinion – humble or otherwise – November is quite the grimmest quantum of the year… far worse than Eliot’s ‘cruelest month’. There are entire days on which the light struggles helplessly to elevate itself beyond a Stygian post-apocalyptic twilight, and the dismal rain lashes the last few leaves from the traumatised trees to besmirch the sodden earth like eviscerated corpses smeared across the battlefield of the dying year.

The shortest day is yet a month away – and our subsequent celebration of ‘Sol Invictus’ has scarce reached the planning stage. Like the dormant green shoots themselves all thoughts of spring are still lodged securely underground – safe from the winter frosts. They will not expose their tender heads to the chill air for many months yet.

The Michaelmas term is always the longest – and the toughest – of the school year. The aim is to crack the preponderance of the curriculum before the solstice break – to form a platform for the anticipated achievements of the new year. The cause is noble, but the casualties are heavy – in terms of exhaustion, langour and ennui.

There comes a point at which one is just counting the days – and at such times, indeed, ‘poets must take care’…

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Catching up

July 18, 2012 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Well – I am back in the UK. A chance to draw breath, to stand back and to try to get a little perspective on how things stand…

The journey was relatively uneventful – if one discounts Air Canada’s now familiar round-trip performance… starting well but tailing off quite badly towards the end (not a good modus operandi for an airline!). The flight from Victoria to Vancouver was on time, but that from YVR to Heathrow began at 75 minutes and ended up nearer 2 hours late. Not a good start for the Canadian Olympic hopefuls with whom I was sharing the flight (though sharing only in the sense that they were sitting up in Executive First and I wasn’t! Still, they doubtless deserve it; let’s hope they are still in First Class for the return trip). My deputy was supposed to pick me up from the airport but the A4 was closed as a result of an accident so I had to take the tube and then walk instead. Doesn’t exactly look good, does it?

Naturally it was raining when I arrived back at Heathrow. Kickass Canada Girl and I had got into conversation with one of the Canadian Olympic administrators at Victoria International before the flight. We were watching the pictures of the sodden Olympic preparations on the TV news in the lounge. “That’s where I’m going”, she enthused. “I have to live there all the time”, I grumbled.

Talking of the weather (yes, I’m a Brit!) the graph at the top of this post shows what England has been going through so far this year. “Bah!”, I say – and “Bah!” again… I can’t immediately find any comparable statistics for Victoria, but during my stay over the last couple of weeks there was a good clear stretch of about 10 gloriously sunny days. I can’t remember the last time that could be said for the UK – and yet, there are suggestions that the weather is finally about to turn and that next week – just in time for the Olympics – the summer will finally arrive. I am an incurable optimist, but even I will not be putting money on this one.

 

I am aware that I have said nothing in recent weeks concerning the putative sale of our apartment in Buckinghamshire. There is good reason for this – nothing has happened! We have again had viewings, but no offers. We are at the stage of considering a possible further price reduction, but as the ‘summer’ is upon us – traditionally a dead time for house sales – I am not sure that such a move would make a difference. It is really quite depressing that this lack of progress simply brings everything else to a complete halt, and that nothing can be done about it. We have stopped looking at houses in Victoria because the trauma of seeing desirable properties – often great bargains to boot – slip by us is just too painful to bear.

The irony is, of course, that all gloom could be dissipated in a moment – if we could just find a buyer. We are – naturally – praying fervently to the real estate gods. Trouble is, I rather get the feeling that they might just be laughing at us…

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Reasons to be cheerful

May 8, 2012 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You’re welcome, we can spare it – yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 – no electric shocks

Reasons to be cheerful – part 3″

Ian Dury

The weekend just gone was the Mayday Bank Holiday in the UK. Normally, not having to go to work on a Monday – and consequently not needing to commute into London – would be cause for unalloyed joy. In this particular instance, however, it meant another day of staring gloomily out of the window at the rain. There was, apparently, a small tornado in Oxfordshire – but we didn’t even see that much excitement!

I did feel rather sorry – paying yesterday, as I did, a brief visit to our local market town – for the good burghers of that community. Considerable work had clearly gone into the setting up of the annual May Fayre, with stalls, stands and fun and games throughout the town. Nothing is quite so sad as the merry English fayre under inclement weather. Being English we don’t have the good sense simply to abandon the event altogether and neither is there a Plan B. Everybody turns out regardless, hip flasks full of Dunkerque spirit, and has a thoroughly miserable time tramping around the sorry-looking amusements, wishing that they were somewhere – anywhere – else.

Kickass Canada Girl informs me that the next public holiday in Canada is in another couple of weeks time, when Victoria Day is celebrated – in honour of Queen Victoria’s birthday. This is so splendidly bizarre a notion that it could almost have been designed purely to make the British feel more at home… which maybe it was. Wikipedia has this:

Following the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, May 24 was by imperial decree made Empire Day throughout the British Empire, while, in Canada, it became officially known as Victoria Day, a date to remember the late queen, who was deemed the “Mother of Confederation”. Over the ensuing decades, the official date in Canada of the reigning sovereign’s birthday changed through various royal proclamations until the haphazard format was abandoned in 1952. That year, the Governor-General-in-Council moved Empire Day and an amendment to the law moved Victoria Day both to the Monday before May 25, and the monarch’s official birthday in Canada was by regular vice-regal proclamations made to fall on this same date every year between 1953 and January 31, 1957, when the link was made permanent by royal proclamation. The following year, Empire Day was renamed Commonwealth Day and in 1977 it was moved to the second Monday in March, leaving the Monday before May 25 only as both Victoria Day and the Queen’s Birthday.

Got that?

This all reminds me somewhat of my previous school which celebrates, as its major open day each year, King George III’s birthday – the 4th of June. For a variety of (doubtless) very good reasons – mostly to do with public examinations – this day never actually falls on June 4th, but is usually several weeks earlier in late May. It is still – needless to say – called ‘The 4th of June’, which can be confusing to the general public since street signs are put up advising of traffic restrictions for… ‘The 4th of June’!

 

Now – all this rain, grey cloud and the current miserable climate are no doubt responsible for us all suffering from SAD. This apparently genuine condition was defined and named by Norman E. Rosenthal and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in the US in 1984. They must have been tickled to bits when they came up with that particular acronym. Nice one chaps!

I, however, have good reason right now not to be sad (see what I did there?). In a few weeks time the Girl is going to be paying an unexpected visit to the UK, for reasons that I will expand on later. Whoopie! She will be here just in time for our next public holiday at the start of June which, this year, coincides with the Queen’s Jubilee – for which we get an extra day off! Celebrations all round – but let’s hope that the weather has also perked up by that point.

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…what we get!

May 3, 2012 in Life in England | 1 comment

“Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.” – Mark Twain

I added to this blog – some short while ago – a ‘Today’s Image’ feature. The intention was that I would regularly upload and display images captured day by day with the Fuji x10, which I now carry with me as a matter of course.

Those reading this post in real time will observe that the current image is of a rather splendid clock. Residents of Victoria will recognise it as being one of the predominant features of the atrium of the Bay Centre in that fair city. Now – clearly this must have been taken some weeks ago, before I returned to the UK.

The reason for the image not being more up to date is that the weather in the UK since I returned can only be described as ‘shocking’, and I have not felt moved to go out looking for photo opportunites. This has been the wettest April for a hundred years – indeed the wettest since records began. We have now moved into May and are all deeply disappointed to discover that the weather is no better. I struggle to recall the last day on which it did not rain, or indeed on which we were not overshadowed by the regulation thick blanket of grey cloud. Depressing!

So bad are things that the cricket season – which should by now be well under way – has seen virtually no play throughout the first three weeks. The only positive – from the reader’s point of view – is that you have thus far been spared my ramblings on the subject of that great game.

So much rain has fallen in the past week that some areas in the west of England are in serious danger of flooding, and the papers have been full of images of rising water levels as rivers burst their banks.

And yet…!

England is in the grip of a drought! Though April was washed out, March was one of the driest on record – as have been, in fact, the last two winters. The aquifers are at an extremely low level and it will take many months of rain for them to be fully replenished. The papers are carrying – alongside the photos of flooded fields – headlines warning that we may, by the end of the year, see standpipes in towns and villages as the water supply is cut off.

Only in England!

When referring to the weather in Victoria, Kickass Canada Girl is partial to the familiar quotation – “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute”. This saying apparently originates in New England and – contrary to some popular belief – was not actually said by Mark Twain. I do myself like the variable Victorian climate (which is clearly a good thing) as it seems to me to elude the dreary inevitability inherent in much English weather.

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