Brollies to hand as normal service is set to resume
SUN, glorious sun. Oh, how splendid it has been to wake up each day secure in the certainty that once more a cerulean canopy will have inched over our heads.
The swallows are back in Bristol and Yorkshire, my birdwatching snouts inform me. Meanwhile, in London each lunchtime temperatures have climbed high enough to spot businessmen perched in that seemingly suave combination of sunglasses and suits, which the British male always seems to get so terribly wrong.
This has been made all the more enjoyable by chilly evenings and mornings that makes each day feel as if it’s the first sunshine of spring. These contrasting temperatures are also creating some interesting atmospheric optics around the country.
Presented on the front page of yesterday’s Telegraph was a photograph of “sun pillars” that had formed on a bright crisp morning near Corfe Castle, Dorset. A similar scene over the Derbyshire Dales has also been snapped and shared.
The phenomenon occurs at sunrise or sunset when light is reflected off ice crystals in high, wispy clouds. So, too, hazy “sun halos”, which have also been spotted in Britain.
Will it last? Several colleagues have asked me this week, as of course the privilege of writing the Telegraph’s Weather Watch column is that you always know what will happen next.
Reading the runes, I can declare: well… er… sort of. Today and tomorrow will be hotter than Greece, with 23C heat predicted in the South East tomorrow. But then, I am afraid, the mercury slinks back down the thermometer to a far more common reading for this time of year. Cold and showery all over on Monday, and rain in the north on Tuesday.
So sunglasses off and umbrellas out. But then we British always do better with a brolly, after all.