Like many of you, I have opinions on what constitutes good weather. Good weather is basically when it’s warm and sunny; everything else is crap weather. In our almost permanently damp and overcast country, it’s probably quite normal to pine for warmer weather. I know I do and that’s why we have always made an effort to go on holiday somewhere warm and sunny at least once a year. That view hasn’t really changed over the years but I have gradually warmed to Alfred Wainwright‘s view that “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” When you live in the Lake District, as he did, he was unarguably right.
Thanks to a heady – actually, it should be footy – combination of arthritis and gout I am virtually housebound at the moment and can only move round the house at glacial speed. In an ideal world, I would like nothing more than being able to sit in our arbor in the garden and read my book. Sadly, it’s all of 11c, blowing a gale and raining and no amount of suitable clothing can make that happen.
So deeply ingrained was my dislike of anything other than warm and sunny weather, I’d lumped every other sort of weather together, regarding them all as crap, which is true if all you want to do is lie around sunbathing all day. Appealing thought that is, there are other things to do.
I don’t know why I’ve had this bizarre obsession with warm weather and it being good. Growing up in Bristol, I don’t recall long, hot summers. Family holidays were spent in West Bay in Dorset and I can only remember the rain beating down on our little caravan and never once spending time on the beach. When I wasn’t on holiday in West Bay, my mum and I would spend whole summers in Rotterdam and, as I recall, the climate was much the same as it is here. Crap. By the time I reached my twenties, it occurred to me that all weather was crap, at least wherever it was I went.
I’ve mellowed a bit now, although I still find extreme cold and rain somewhat stressful, which is a story in itself. And part of that is understanding why crap weather is actually good weather.
My partner is a very keen gardener and by admiring her hard work and talent, I have come to realise that actually you need some crap weather, or rain as we call it, to make the garden grow. If it was dry all year, the ground would be parched and lifeless. All those spectacular colours I sit and admire, from the warmth of the living room, just wouldn’t be here. And because I now accept that some types of weather are not necessarily better or worse than others, I now understand the changing of the seasons, too.
I used to be one of those who lazily bemoaned the lack of changing seasons. “They don’t change like they used to,” I would complain. “It’s one long season these days.” Absolute tosh. Watching the garden change, sometimes incredibly slowly, is a wonder to behold. And if you pay attention, something I didn’t used to do, you can literally see the change of the seasons before your very eyes.
My views on what good and bad weather was changed when I started to visit Corfu in Greece. Summers there are long and hot, yet the island is astonishing verdant and green. There could only be one reason for that: it pisses with rain for much of the winter and some of the autumn and spring. Now that is my kind of climate and if I wasn’t so attached to my way of life in Old Blighty I’d head out there in a heartbeat. As it is, my warm weather lifestyle is for holidays only and even then, only some holidays. There are places galore I need to see which are anything but warm before my coffin slips into the crematorium oven, which will be the warmest place ever.
It’s anything but warm and sunny today but the garden looks so beautiful, even if I can’t actually sit out in it. And if all that crap weather makes it all look so good, how can I complain?
