“Everywhere you go”, warbled Neil Finn, “Always take the weather with you.” Excellent, albeit unscientific, advice, I’m sure you would agree. By the weather, I suspect the popular beat combo outfit Crowded House meant warm and sunny weather, not the cool, gloomy, overcast and wet version we have today. Unfortunately, it’s the latter I’ve taken with me today.
Of course, I shouldn’t complain. For one thing, the weather is usually cool, gloomy, overcast and wet pretty well anytime of year in Britain. The other thing is that we’ve had a long run of what we like to call ‘good weather’ and we got rather spoilt.
The warm and sunny weather came at a good time for me because I had just seen my antidepressants halved by a GP who said they were bad for me. As with many folk, the light lifts my mood and the darkness does the opposite. I’ve never been diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), although I do have many of the symptoms (except a decreased sex drive, obviously). Maybe as a mental person, I notice mood changes more closely than some folk so maybe I just get a bit fed up when the sunny weather disappears.
I am no meteorological expert so you could take what follows with a pinch of salt but I do fear for the rest of the summer. In my experience, May seems to be a very good month weather-wise, June even better. It’s only when July and August come along that everything turns to rat shit. In childhood, the only British resort we ever went to on holiday was West Bay in Dorset and I have not a single memory of going on the beach. But I do have memories of sitting in a tiny caravan with my mum and three grandparents as the rain battered on the windows. And later, when I had children of my own, a week in Cornwall was always, without exception, accompanied by rain and lots of it.
Sorry to be depressing here, but we have less than two months remaining of the meteorological summer since autumn technically begins on 1st September. And there is precious little time for the weather to settle down before the nights close in and we start thinking about bloody Christmas. I don’t think there is any particular weather law that says that we are bound to have some fine weather before September and, having had a glimpse of the long term forecast, there is only the chance of some better weather from later this July. Given that our local TV weather presenter rarely manages to predict the following day’s weather with any degree of accuracy, I have no faith in him, or any of the other forecasters to get things right at least two weeks away.
Soon, then, the central heating will clank back into action, it will be pitch dark and – horror upon horror – we will be putting the clocks back to make things even more dark and depressing and it won’t matter whether you take the weather with you or not.
If feels like autumn today which is a drag given it’s not even halfway through summer. If it carries on like this, I might just hibernate and come back to see you when the clocks change back next March.
