Blown off course by the wind and rain

AS a full-on gale buffeted the lane and the wind whined like a troop of lost ghosts in the telegraph wires, I began to wonder if we aren’t a bit ‘wired’ ourselves. I don’t know about you, but the storms of the last couple of days have, sort of, wrong-footed or discombobulated me.

Perhaps it’s just part of getting old, but something in my bones had told me summer was on its way. Right now, though, winter has returned with a vengeance.

It’s a good job pubs and other hospitality establishments can now serve indoors, because you’d not want an al-fresco meal or pint at this particular moment as the rain drills sideways in the south-westerly.

But what about that human hardwiring or body-clock? Can it really be the case that we feel the changing of the seasons? That our senses know what to expect and when to expect it? Is there some inner part of us that is pre-programmed to predict the changing cycles of nature?

Or is it simply that our calendars tell us it is May – tell us, indeed, that there are only 32 sunrises to go before Midsummer’s Day? Knowing the date comes with an element of expectation. It’s late May, therefore summer should be getting into gear.

However, I believe humans must have a certain amount of hard-wiring. If a migratory bird weighing just a few ounces can have a clockwork mechanism that makes it fly thousands of miles as the seasons change, why can’t we upright apes?

Mind you, I’ve seen a few bedraggled swallows recently who may be questioning the accuracy of their onboard body-clocks. This valley is always well stocked with members of the Hirundinidae family in summer and a few evenings ago the skies were full of swallows and house martins. Now there’s just one old crow in the heavens above my house, and he looks like a half-shipwrecked galleon being tossed about in a maelstrom.

He certainly appears to be discombobulated – an almost jokey and lighthearted word which does not do justice to the way the storm is making some people feel. During a phone conversation earlier, a colleague told me she felt really down because of the weather – making me realise that I too was in a bad mood. As the hours went by, I discovered lots of other people I know were feeling low or bad tempered.

There are probably medical scientists who could tell you exactly which part of the brain is affected by weather and even point to an inner bodyclock which synchronises our moods with changing seasons.

To the layman, of course, it’s all a mystery – and sometimes when I’m feeling puzzled by the natural world, I use my dog as a measuring stick. Finn is the closest thing to nature I observe each day. And what I know about the woolly headed lurcher is that he is a creature of habit. His body-clock likes everything to happen at exactly the same time each day.

Like many other canines, he has been very happy over the past year because a dog’s routine becomes wonderfully stable during a lockdown. The humans in the family aren’t belting off to work or disappearing on aeroplanes for weeks on end. In fact, they’re not going anywhere much. So everything happens at home and soon it all becomes routine.

Dogs like that. They do not like the unknown. And I reckon that we upright apes – somewhere deep down inside – are just the same.

Indeed, I have heard psychologists say that we love holidays – which are nothing more than temporary wrenches away from our normal routine – precisely because they are so stressful and discombobulating. After a fortnight of lost luggage, tummy-upsets, afternoon hangovers and arguments with hotel managers, we return home freshly in love with the boring old life we were mad enough to leave behind.

And at home our circadianrhythms, developed over countless generations, tell us to go out into our gardens or onto our farms and think: “Right, summer is coming so I’m going to plant this, that and the other.”

Then a bunch of late frosts arrive and kill half the plants, only to be followed by a series of storms which smash down the rest.

No wonder we’re feeling discombobulated! Indeed, the word doesn’t do our angst and despair justice. We shake our fists at the sky, which, in the windy Westcountry, shrugs with a cloud and replies by spitting down five months worth of rain in a day.

Being cocooned in concrete, people in cities probably escape much of this interaction with Mother Nature and for them her increasingly erratic mood swings go unnoticed. Out in the countryside many of us are on first name terms with Jack Frost and we shake hands with the wind so often we almost miss it on those rare days when the air is still and sultry.

Now as I write with rain lashing the windows, I hear there’s going to be a heatwave next week. I do not know how accurate this is – I’ll believe it when I see it. But I do know we Brits are hard-wired or pre-programmed to love talking about the weather.

No wonder we’re feeling discombobulated in this weather as we shake our fists at the sky