Somewhere, in the back catalogue of 6589 blogs, I am pretty sure there will be one which started with, “We don’t get proper seasons anymore. Not like when I were a lad.” If not, there probably should be because I was very much of that view until my partner, a wise and insightful, not to mention tolerant, person showed me otherwise. The seasons are definitely for real.
I have always been a believer that winter lasts for six months, basically from the start of September to the end of February. Technically, I know that’s not true, but try telling my depressed brain that. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have Season Affective Disorder but I can feel my mood dip as soon as August is over. It’s all downhill from there, as I watch the garden go to sleep. And being educated about our little garden is what has educated me.
I hadn’t noticed the small changes that were going on. In February, I noted that the grass was growing apace but that was it. No, my partner pointed out: that wasn’t all that was changing, pointing out the signs of new life, the darling buds of February, if you will. Just over a week ago, I noticed the changing of the seasons when our garden pond came alive to the sight of frogspawn.
We have only had a pond since lockdown in 2020 but the frogs found it very quickly, as did newts and other forms of life. Observing the pond and listening to a proper gardener who understands the seasons has been revelatory.
Gardening to me, given my ADHD mind, is not something I do, beyond strimming, grass cutting and taking stuff to the tip. Yet there is meaning to it. It is basically nature at work, given a helping hand. The plants are there for a reason, one being to attract bees who are massively in decline, alarmingly so after such a wet winter. For the first time in my life, I find myself sitting quietly on a garden chair or under our arbour watching nature at work and there is always something happening now that the seasons are changing.
There is no doubt that spring has arrived in Bristol this week. I have already wandered down the garden path and the sunlight is killing off the morning chill, with the promise that we will hit a remarkable 15 or even 16c today: 60 fahrenheit, basically. Without a cloud in a sky, the world, at least my little old world, is a brighter and better place and there is nowhere I’d rather be.
Climate change is already affecting our weather, bringing about more extremes with increasing regularity, and in time that will have a detrimental effect on seasons. Maybe 16c in March is a portent of what is to come? For now, the seasons are still very much alive and kicking, as I can see from our back garden.
I’m letting the train take the strain later on today and I will be looking for more evidence of the change of the seasons. There will be plenty of it. I do think that the attitude that “We don’t get proper seasons anymore. Not like when I were a lad” is yet another myth perpetrated by elderly folk like me, who are nostalgic for a happier and better time that never really happened. In 1993, the then Prime Minister John Major said we were a nation of “long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and… old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist“. It was a delightful image from that rare beast, a thoroughly decent Conservative, creating a sepia-coloured vision from country villages from a long time ago. He was definitely talking about summer and guess what? We live in a changeable climate and we do get days and weeks like the way he describes them, it’s just that it also rains a lot, like it always did.
That rain – or terrible weather, as us old folks call it – is a big reason why our green and pleasant land looks like it does. I guess we won’t get one without the other.
I am just glad that the seasons are still changing and that at least for today we can celebrate the seasons in the sun, maybe with a little joy and fun, as Rod McKuen put it. I don’t know about the the long shadows on county cricket grounds and the old ladies cycling to communion, but I will be enjoying a pint of hopefully not too warm beer with friends today. Spring has sprung. That doesn’t mean it will be sunny for the next three months but nature is changing and if someone as unobservant as me can see it, then I hope you can, too.
