Dismal weather or not, moving Easter won’t help
Comment Fordyce Maxwell
Some weather sayings have been around for centuries with “Red sky at night shepherds’ delight, red sky in the morning, shepherds’ warning,” probably most quoted. Incidentally, it also applies to sailors. And the rest of us.
“Fine before seven, rain before eleven” might run it close. Meteorologists can offer a reasonable amount of evidence to support both these sayings, but a more recent one I hear occasionally is more questionable: “Change the time, change the weather.”
It can’t have been around for much more than a century as the parliamentary Summer Time Act, moving clocks on an hour on the last Saturday in March, back an hour on the last Saturday in October, took effect in 1916. It has been messed about with occasionally since.
Once was during the Second World War when double summer time – no fall back and an extra hour spring forward – was used to allow farm work to continue even longer in daylight. Also, according to some religious organisations worried about public morals, more chance for late-night courting. A second attempt was the British Standard Time experiment of 1968-71 when clocks did not change. The effect on road accidents was argued about endlessly. Farmers were predictably against the experiment, and Parliament eventually voted 366-81 to go back to spring forward, fall back.
On second thoughts, that “Change the time …” saying probably dates from the first move in 1916. My guess is that the weather did change that year and
0 Easter is now focused more on eggs than religion another “traditional” saying sprang to life.
This year, as on most years since, changing the time has had no effect on the weather. It has remained as changeable and infuriating as March often is.
Last Thursday on the Berwickshire coast the sun shone out of a blue sky, larks singing their hearts out as waves frothed around the rocks on that spectacular stretch, and a tractor driver was drilling spring barley into such a perfect light-land seedbed that an optimist might expect to see shoots poking through next day.
Next day, of course, is today and at time of writing the temperature has droppedabouttendegrees, rain is falling from a grey sky and sleet is forecast. Lambs and ewes, all looking good in spite of the awful lambing weather earlier this month, that were grazing and lazing in sunshine yesterday will today be wet and huddled.
Because this is Easter weekend and the weather is moderate to awful – although feel free to supply your own adjective – and because collectively we have the memory-span of a goldfish, there is the usual clamour to make Easter a fixed date that will produce guaranteed better weather. In Britain? At any time of year?
As public holidays of any kind make no difference to farmers because if there is work to be done it’s done and if weather permits land work goes ahead particularly in a late spring like this, they have no interest in why Easter is, or can be, a moveable feast.
It’s even harder to take an interest when most of the population now equate Easter with chocolate eggs and bunnies and shopping rather than religion and roast lamb. But its changing dates are already fixed for decades ahead based on a slight variation of religious disputes about how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
The net result of disputes between various branches of religion is that the date of any given Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, but never at the beginning of the Jewish Passover. I think.
Regardless of how it is fixed, as farmers and holidaymakers know, the date of any Easter is no guarantee of good weather, whether it is as early as it can be under the rules, 22 March, or as late, 25 April. That is 35 possible dates for Easter Sunday. Remarkable.
We can all remember good weather early Easters and awful late ones and like changing the time fixing a date for a religious festival would make no difference to weather coming our way. As this year. We can only wait impatiently for an end to what seems like a six-month winter.