Of sweet, mild days ...and the moments that warm cold hearts
IT may have been the snowdrops a-bobbing by the second week of January, dainty and brave in the thin shade of bare trees. The carpets of aconite and crocus in the woods last week; the two magpies, evidently bonded, pecking for this and that in the orchard up the hill, flying back and fore with the makings of a nest.
The frogs spawning in the Outer Hebrides – someone posted a snap on Facebook – or even the primrose yesterday, in soft, defiant bloom by a pile of dead logs.
nor is there snow on the hills and the weatherman this week suggests temperatures in favoured parts of the land may reach 20 degrees – all about us, from the kiss of sun on your pale wintered face, to the first flurry of insects and the building chorus of birdsong, attests that we are enjoying a very early spring.
You might argue we deserve it, especially after the Beast from the East blew in nearly a year ago and for some days iced us up in Arctic gridlock. But in recent years, a markedly late spring has been the norm.
We have had frost and even the odd dusting of snow in early May. In 2013, at least on Lewis, we had hard frost well into April, and in 2015, spring took so long to get going that trees and shrubs stood bare, in the Highlands, till it was almost June.
But exuberant crocuses, mated birds and ditches jellied with frogspawn – all by mid-February – suggests, this year, we are running to a very different clock: a most early spring after a really rather brief, mild and exceptionally dry winter. So mild, in fact, that some saw butterflies flittering about in December.
It is far from ideal. Even as the skylark already sings in Lincolnshire, recent colonial settlers, such as the Cetti’s warbler, may be caught out by an unexpected cold snap – as happened catastrophically last March. Thousands perished. Summer blow-ins like the pied flycatcher could arrive on schedule to find, thanks to early budding, they have missed Peak Caterpillar and struggle to feed their young.
Expect, too, many moorland wildfires in already tinderbox conditions – and untold bugs and midges this summer, as there has been no protracted deep freeze to slay them by the million in soil and bog.
There has already been flapping by the sort of despiteBrexit types who love a really good panic. ‘Is this the end of snow?’ wailed one newspaper last week.
ALL those global warming fanatics who, whatever the day may bring – roads of rain, skip-loads of snow, sunburn in March or a grievous murrain – simply, smugly shake their heads and assure TV cameras: ‘In the decades ahead, we can expect more weather like this.’
Except, slyly, they do not talk of global warming these days, as the planet has refused to grow any hotter since 1998, and instead like to defame those of us sceptical of all that green rubbish, as David Cameron nearly said, as ‘climate change deniers’.
no one denies climate change. Everyone of my Scots generation can attest that, back in the Seventies, winters were much harder and set in much earlier.
Archaeology attests to quite dramatic alteration; pollen samples from the soil around the 5,000-year-old Callanish Stones suggests that, at the time of their late neolithic erection, the Outer Hebrides enjoyed weather very similar to that today in the South of France.
From 950 to 1150 AD, Europe basked in the Medieval Warm Period, when they even managed to grow grapes in Scandinavia and when generally ‘grain crops flourished, alpine tree lines rose, many new cities arose and the population more than doubled’ – a reminder that climate change is not necessarily catastrophic.
Except, of course, when it is: the period between 1300 and 1870 saw such a run of winters much colder than anything anyone alive can now remember that it is known as the Little Ice Age – and so bad were they from 1650 that around a tenth of Scots quietly starved to death and the damage to our economy and morale was a huge factor in delivering the Union of 1707.
The Thames on several occasions froze solid; the Swedes managed to invade Denmark on foot; Lisbon endured snowstorms; and we, this side of Hadrian’s Wall, made the best of things and invented curling. (There are still outdoor curling ponds in many Scottish towns, though few have seen much action since 1979.)
Of course, it also begot splendid European art – such as Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow – and radically changed farming. Cultivation of the turnip allowed us to overwinter most of our cattle and the coming of the potato (which happily withstands dreich, damp summers) had profound consequences for the West Highlands and Ireland.
THESE largely balmy months, our high street shops have been stacked with boots and jackets and heavy coats no one wants to buy. Even as the wild geese come honking home for the summer, daffodils bopped boldly at Windsor in January and, in the West Country, people now find themselves mowing their lawns year-round.
Any gnarled gardener will tell you the weather has definitely changed since the early Eighties; that it is notably milder and wetter. Worse, it is increasingly capricious.
not three weeks ago we had a sudden, protracted and very severe spell of frost. The exceptionally wet winter last year was followed, for most, by an unprecedentedly hot and dry summer. Things once freakish – severe flooding, Hammer House of Horror thunderstorms, epic hail showers, summer gales and even tornados – are increasingly common in the United Kingdom.
now we may be on the brink of the hottest February day on record. But rather than fretting about CO2, El nino or the ozone layer, let us seize these sweet, mild days with uncharacteristic abandon.
Rise with the new dawn chorus of larks and thrushes, blackbirds and robins. Pad the bright and, as yet, leafless woods, looking for the scurry of a vole or the golden glint of the celandine. Any day now, the first bumblebees will stir; we are but weeks short of the first, fleet, gay swallows and the glories of cherry blossom and those days when we can paddle in the sea, buy the paper in our shirtsleeves and treat ourselves to tea on the lawn.
Amidst so much public unease and political tumult, in such an over-entertained and over-stimulated age, stay mentally as much as you can within such moments.
‘The best of life is lived quietly,’ mused Irish writer John McGahern, ‘where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.’