Country Mouse
In recent months, my breakfast tabloid hasn’t been giving me the daily fix of fear I’d come to depend on for peristaltic purposes. But yesterday was an exception. ‘Downpours a risk to life,’ it told me. ‘Mary – don’t go to London today. It says forecasters warn of a potential danger to life as a band of wet weather looks set to continue battering the UK. Misery for commuters, Mary!’
She looked up from the bag she was packing. ‘That won’t affect you, then.’
I chucked another log onto the open fire where it spat pleasantly. Owing to the winter-in-summer weather event, I am currently raiding next year’s ethically sourced – but as yet unseasoned – home-grown alder logs.
I cannot remember ever having had fires this late in the season. Certainly not in the mornings. But, on a serious note, my heart goes out to those who have to carry on working, come rain or shine, especially those working in quagmires. Numbers were down by 50 per cent at the local agricultural show.
May was alpine. Anecdotal evidence confirmed that any number of wedding guests froze in underheated marquees. At one event, the Young, who now confuse weddings with parties and expect to dance till dawn, arrived in their typical flimsy costumes. Many ended by wrapping themselves in tablecloths to counter the refrigeration effect.
I myself was caught out at a fundraising dinner billed as taking place in Kensington Palace. Too late did I look closely at the invitation: Kensington Palace Pavilion.
Before sitting down, we circulated outside to admire the herbaceous borders of the royal gardens. Dressed in only a schoolmaster’s summer jacket and thin shirt, I realised something was wrong when I was introduced to Clive Aslet, editor at large of Country Life magazine. Huddling, with my arms locked around my shoulders in straitjacket mode, I was reluctant to release them and hoped that a bow, as used by an Austrian friend, might do instead of a handshake. Bobbing my head violently forward, like a Nazi taking leave of his superior officer, I nearly headbutted the fellow who had unwisely invaded my personal space.
Slipping into the pavilion to thaw, I was not treated with the respect other climate-emergency refugees are accustomed to receiving. Not even a thermal blanket. Instead I was rebuffed by a catering jobsworth and asked to rejoin the others outside until they were ready for us. I acted daft and headed for a slide projector where I defrosted in the warm jetstream of its fan.
The modern mantra, given by meteorologists, that we are experiencing ‘warmer and wetter summers’, is a boon to the pub bore and black-cab comedian.
‘Mate! Flaming June! Are you flaming kidding? ... And they call this global warming … pah!’
No doubt warming is a general trend but the reality is that this summer we’re experiencing a complicating factor, a jetstream flip which has led to a colder and wetter summer.
Weather is our national obsession but, at a time when our very English identity is under threat, might discussing the weather become taboo, to pre-empt offence-seekers’ charging us with the crime of reinforcing our own cultural stereotypes?
Weather has certainly become less enjoyable to discuss. One set of interlocutors wants to say it’s our own fault – we ourselves have become a geophysical force in a human-caused climate emergency. The other set, fans of Trump, perhaps, declares that global warming (now called global heating by scientists as warming sounds too agreeable) is a hoax invented by the Chinese to attack US manufacturing.
At times like these, I reach for a slim volume from that veteran observer of all things English, Richard Ingrams, in England – an Anthology.
Here I find historic corroboration of unseasonal weather in this very neck of the Wiltshire woods. A quote from an 1878 nature diary, by Richard Jefferies, reads:
‘Summer cold in June. Shivering in the parlour with lilac and flowers in the grate and apple bloom in the garden. Yet cold, and all the green things dripping.’
Human memory is short. Last week, I was praying for rain after a month of drought. Now that the whole garden is waterlogged, badgers and moles no longer need to target my vegetable patch for earthworms. They are freely available.
Meanwhile, the song thrushes are feasting on a mobile army of escargots, safe in the knowledge that in this garden no slug pellets have been used.
If I were to be transported in my Parker Knoll back 80 million years, which is nothing in geological time, we would be floating in warm tropical waters, surrounded by sea urchins and sponges.
In the more recent Stone Age (10,0002,000 BC), this area of Wiltshire was the metropolis. Nearby Silbury Hill was used for sun worship, and for measuring the sun’s shadow. In this way, edicts could be issued as to the proper date of seed time and harvest. The same calculations were taking place at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt: remarkably, the daily gauge of the shadow at both giant sundials is almost exactly four feet.
But those cultures were based on sun worship. We must now make a paradigm, or even polar, shift in our thinking. We must accept that one thing to unite us with the inevitable hordes of subSaharan climate-change refugees who will be heading for these islands will have to be a cultural worship of rain.