One day my spring will come

A Backward Spring

The trees are afraid to put forth buds,
And there is timidity in the grass;
The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds,
And whether next week will pass
Free of sly sour winds is the fret of each bush
Of barberry waiting to bloom.

Yet the snowdrop's face betrays no gloom,
And the primrose pants in its heedless push,
Though the myrtle asks if it's worth the fight
This year with frost and rime
To venture one more time
On delicate leaves and buttons of white
From the selfsame bough as at last year's prime,
And never to ruminate on or remember

What happened to it in mid-December.

Thomas Hardy

Fate & the weather

I have to write about the weather again.

By Monday evening the last vestiges of snow had disappeared from the hills, washed away by light rain or melted by sun & temperatures well above zero for the first time since the blizzards came. All the high roads were finally open.

The winds had swung right round to the west & by Tuesday they were strengthening into sharp, but mercifully short-lived gusts. By Wednesday it really was not very pleasant being outside, wind picking up & clouds racing in from across the Atlantic at a rate of knots – at least this presented an interesting & relatively unthreatening spectacle, after all the icily undifferentiated masses of grey which have been our lot for so long; but they were strong enough to close some of the high roads to high-sided vehicles.

By early evening the sky was black & shopping bags swung like pendulums in my hand.

Thursday was really cold again, had to put some heating on in the evening & restore the extra blanket to the bed.

All was clear again by Friday afternoon, & this morning the man who gave us the forecast on local radio was able to tell us it was a great day for hanging out the washing – sun, light breeze & temperatures all the way up to 15°.

I fear our local MP - by organising a celebrity cricket match to be held on the anniversary of the match which was famously snowed off in 1975 - may be tempting the weather gods to give us more unseasonal surprises this year.

Link
Andrew Bingham MP organising Celebrity Cricket Match in aid of DLRAA
Related postJune 2nd 1975

Funny old week

It’s a funny old week.

For the most part there has been lots of blue sky & sunshine, but the clouds have been racing the wrong way – to, not from, the west, driven by a biting, gusting east wind. The temperature has barely risen above freezing in the day time; patches of snow still lie on the hills, & even low down in places where the sun don’t get to shine. One of the most lonely high roads is still closed because of ice & snow.

Tuesday saw queues practically out of the door at the bank – not a panic, in the conventional sense, just the end of the financial year & the first day they were open after a long holiday weekend.

Just to add to the disorientation, the clocks went forward to Summer Time, many familiar Radio 4 fixtures came to the end of their season, so some familar audio landmarks are lost; & BBC World Service, which takes over the frequency at 1am, sticks resolutely to GMT, so their programmes have moved their slots on our clock.

No wonder it is hard to remember what time of which day of which season it is

Duck report

I saw ducks in the stream this weekend – lower down the lane, not opposite the house. First sighting this year.

Only a small group, & three of them were white. Very unusual for round here. I wonder if the snow has anything to do with that.

And we did have snow

Well …

I put Sunday’s poem in the queue for publication (on this blog) on Friday, during a brief foray to the library, & was I glad I made the effort to brave snow & icy winds & go out. The whole weekend has been spent in confinement, all because of the weather. People have been talking about the worst for over 10 years, but I think its more like quarter of a century at least.

The snow has not been all that bad, in itself. I noticed no heavy falls, certainly no white-outs, during the hours of daylight, more just a continuing, unrelenting cross between drizzle & haar, no snowflakes of any size. But it settled, inches deep, fine & powdery, for the wind to do its worst on. The result has been deep drifts, even at low levels, in any & all areas exposed to the relentless blast from the east.

Many roads have been only intermittently passable – the labour of the snow-ploughs turned as ineffective as that of those clearing the Augean* stables; high level roads have just remained resolutely closed. Sporadic attempts were made to run a bus to the airport along at least part of the route – not a journey for the faint-hearted, especially as those announcements were soon followed by a radio warning that services had been suspended once again.

Buxton was almost completely cut off, even the main A6 impassable in both directions, though Radio 2 announced at 7pm on Sunday that it had finally been cleared, giving at least one through route. To some extent however life carried on as normal inside the town, with local radio announcing that many facilities would merely close earlier than usual.

Remarkably the trains continued to run, until defeated temporarily by snow drifts around Sunday lunchtime. The last I heard was that two extra snowplough trains had been sent out.

I had been optimistic about the prospects for Sunday since, after darkness fell on Saturday, we witnessed once again the phenomenon of a partial thaw where we nestle; the wind died down, precipitation ceased, some of the snow slid off hedges, gutters were dripping, dark patches appeared on the flagstones in the backyard.

Obviously it was not to be. The chill wind from Russia stirred itself once again, putting at least a temporary stop to our activities.

Makes us a bit like Cyprus, in a way.

*the Word spellchecker suggested amending this to Aegean.

Strain & fear

Thursday's Times carried a column by Matthew Parris under the headline Budget too hopeful. We want despair.

The weather, which has just gone silly now, according to the driver of the bus which took me into town on Friday, seems to match only too well the despondency which has settled over the economy & politics. The worst snow storm of this winter (I know technically it is now Spring, according to both the Met Office’s tidy definition & more ancient tradition) had brought closure of all the high roads & most schools in the county, but travel less than 10 miles north & there had been no snow at all in town

This extract from Tennyson’s In Memoriam seems to fit the mood.

from In Memoriam
Tonight the winds begin to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day:

The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies ;
The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea ;
And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world :

And but for fancies, which aver
That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir
That makes the barren branches loud
And but for fear it is not so,

The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Autumn in March

All too predictably perhaps, foran epoch when we often seem to get several seasons in one day, today is more like autumn – mists, without the mellow fruitfulness. Following straight on from yesterday's Spring/

The sun tried hard to break through around midday, but by three o’clock it was well & truly descended once again

Related post
Spring day

Spring day

Spring has sprung – at least for today. Blue sky, sunshine, no wind of which to speak.

By mid-afternoon I was carrying, rather than wearing, my padded jacket & quilted waistcoat, wearing only jumper & t shirt.

The jumper is a new acquisition, a beautiful pale grey with a cowl neck & cable stitching up the front, 80% acrylic, 20% wool. It is very lightweight light but deliciously warm. A totally accidental find in British Home Stores, whose Sale rail I thought worth investigating as I was just cutting through one bitter day earlier in the week.

Orange spring

No clouds in the sky at all today – high, clear pale blue, sunshine weak but warm. Spring in the step.

Curiously however, the light has been distinctly autumnal rather than springlike since the gloom began to lift last Friday, all pink, orange & pale brown rather than yellow green & blue. Perhaps it is a sign of the same atmospheric effect that turns a red sky at night into a promise of another fine day tomorrow.

Getting light again

Strange to wake up soon after seven this morning & find daylight coming through the windows, the sky covered only by a high layer of white mist.

Makes a human being feel lighter too, given a respite from that feeling of being crushed under dark louring skies.

There were even a few stars twinkling through the kitchen window late last night.

Whatever the weather

I am writing this on my laptop at home, having decided by mid-morning that there is no point in trying to go out today. This unsettled & unsettling weather has thrown a surprise snow storm at us – unforecasted, as far as I can tell. The local councils cannot have known, since no roads were gritted. So, although the snow does not amount to all that much, there is traffic chaos, including on the main A6 all the way to Stockport, & some schools are closed.

Yesterday was cold with a blustery wind, plus heavy rain in the late afternoon/early evening. Even stronger winds, gale force in some places, were forecast for today, with scattered wintry showers, (longer spells of snow & sleet possible over Scotland). As ever, it was hard to tell what we should expect in our corner of the world, but it was only the prospect of high wind that was of the slightest concern.

I got a surprise when I went to put out the rubbish for collection last night; as I bent to tie up the bag bits of something kept falling out of my hair. I assumed my head must have brushed against the philadelphus, to which a few leaves still cling, until one of the frozen snowflakes caught the light. None of them was settling on the ground however & the wind was still blustering.

Another surprise lay in wait as I caught the tail end of Tony Livesey’s programme on Radio 5 Live – broadcast from Manchester – where colleagues were teasing Tony about the problems he would face on his drive home after 1am. Even Rhod Sharp joined in when he came to give his plug for Up All Night, astonishingly saying that anyone trying to drive to Buxton would be facing a real challenge, & he would be keeping listeners updated on his own programme. I still assumed they must be talking about high winds.

Sleep came before the promised elucidation.

Even before those late night excitements I had been beginning to mentally draft a post for today on the unsettling weather, inspired by thunder & lightning. We had had more of this around 8 or 9 in the evening, a few long rumbles rolling around the hills, not too close, the lightning imperceptible from inside with the curtains drawn, except for one flash which briefly made the lights flicker & the radio stutter. This makes the 4th or 5th such episode since the first snow began to melt, all very similar except for one in the early hours of Sunday morning which was loud enough to wake everybody up & with lightning which must have been sheeting across the whole sky, lighting up the room even through the curtains.

All while having an argument with myself: not another post on the weather.

The seductive power of writing about the weather I have come to recognise only since starting this blog – gives plenty of free rein to description & the use of adjectives, something frowned upon in official & academic writing. But it’s my blog, I can do whatever I like, nobody else has to read it – I used to skip all those bits myself, especially when attempting a Victorian novel with pages of the stuff. For heaven’s sake, all you need do is establish that ‘twas a dark & stormy night, no need to go on so.

However, sometimes language itself can lead you to weather science. Language Log provides some very useful links to discussions of how the pattern of rain has changed (in Britain at least), just through a discussion of how we should name, which word we should use for, this ‘new’ kind. One option is ‘convective rain’ since it is thought to be produced by processes similar to those which produce thunderstorms. I find that curious, since its frequency in these parts seems to be correlated with a fall in thunderstorms, suggesting something else is going on as well.

Perhaps it’s the bacteria in the clouds. Some of which have a pink pigment which acts as a sunscreen, enabling them to resist death by ultraviolet ray, even thousands of feet up & so much closer to the sun. Although it remains a mystery how they get up there. One speculation is that hurricanes & violent winds help create a kind of hovering effect which sweeps them up into the storm clouds. (I paraphrase all this from an intriguing Weather Eye column by Paul Simons in Monday’s Times). So I expect the jet stream is ultimately to blame – one way or another it always seems to end up getting the blame for our current unusual weather ‘events’.

Links
Georgia Tech: Study Finds Substantial Microorganism Populations in the Upper Troposphere
Research on Airborne Ice Nucleating Species (RAINS)
Can Bacteria in Clouds Influence Global Weather Patterns?
Live Science: Earth's Clouds Alive With Bacteria
National Geographic: Rainmaking Bacteria Ride Clouds to "Colonize" Earth?

Snow adventure

On Tuesday last week any self-congratulatory tendencies on my part for venturing out in the snow were put to shame by a gentleman I met while waiting for the bus into town.

White haired & well past retirement age he told of how he had just walked from the Cat & Fiddle, on a day when, although the sky was clear & the sun poked through occasionally, the snow still lay thick & frozen as soon as you got away from gritted roads.

Having rejected two of the more challenging routes – one because there were no footprints visible anywhere near the track & the other because he decided the glaring whiteness made it impossible to distinguish between what were merely snow-covered natural hummocks and dangerously deep drifts, he settled for the relatively safe & travelled tracks alongside the reservoirs. It had taken him just over three hours to cover a distance of about 5 miles, (on the level, as the crow flies) & felt it a job well done in overcoming the recent excesses.

Furthermore, he said, he intended to take the bus only as far as Disley, then, after a cup of tea & a sandwich, walk the remaining three miles home through Lyme Park.

He carried neither back pack nor stick – useless in deep snow he claimed - though he clearly knew the ground well & carried a satnav. What fascinated me - & made me deeply envious – was that, although well-booted & jacketed, he wore no gloves, & yet his hands looked rosy & warm.

Link
Derbyshire webcams snow watch

Snow stories

The Met Office were warning of more heavy snow on Friday. As usual it was hard to know whether these warnings applied to our part of the country, but local radio seemed confident that substantial falls would be confined to the high ground, so I set off out with no qualms about being able to get back home in the evening.

My confidence seemed justified, despite the bitterly cold wind that was blowing intermittently all afternoon & a few small but wet flurries as darkness fell (at least the days are getting noticeably longer now). And since it was raining when I came out of Sainsbury’s  I naturally assumed the danger of snow had passed.

So it was a surprise when I looked up as we got to the village to see snow falling & everything blanketed with white – the road had obviously not been gritted.

Would the bus even be able to get up the hill?

No problem – these modern buses don’t struggle like the old ones – the lower centre of gravity must help with the traction.

I got off into a mini blizzard, the snow stinging my face when it hit but no point even trying to open an umbrella in that wind. Half way down our hill I passed a couple coming up, determined on their night out (not youngsters but somewhere in their middling years), their bootprints coming up & mine going down the only sign of life outside. With no gritting all surfaces were covered with a good inch of wet but soft snow which is easy enough to walk on.

It came as a pleasant surprise to find that my jacket (just the down one, I hadn’t bothered with the heavy duty rain jacket) was not wet through, though whatever it was that fell off when I shook the big red woollen scarf which had been wrapped round my head & neck skittered & scattered over the floor with a sound like grains of rice or small beads. I was even more astounded to find that the bit of my hair that hangs down below the scarf was solid with ice.

A hearty supper of proper pork sausages from a local butcher, roast parsnips & a mound of steamed courgette, leek & broccoli, followed by ginger sponge pudding, swept away even the memory of cold.

The snow continued to fall in bursts throughout the evening but I was comforted to see, when I looked through the kitchen window, that although the top of the leylandii hedge just over the back wall was wearing a thick white blanket on its flat top, it had not settled at all on the top of the hedge on the far side of the field; it had not been that one’s turn to be trimmed this autumn, so its more raggedy top provided no similarly hospitable bed. There seemed no threat that we would wake up in the morning to find ourselves unable to move outside.

We got a bit anxious a few years ago when there was a campaign to introduce draconian controls on the use of leylandii – well maintained, they provide invaluable protection from westerly winds, rain & snow. And noise too; the local factory, which provides much needed employment, is also surrounded by a well maintained hedge.

By Saturday midday the road surfaces were clear, though the pavements were still thickly covered & children were sledging boisterously & happily in the fields. As I stood at the bus stop I witnessed the snow suddenly slip & slide off the roofs & windscreens of cars parked nearby – a small reminder of how sudden & frightening such falls can be, a lesson in the need to take care when passing near drifts on the slopes of the hills.

Saturday’s weather was cold but otherwise uneventful, until it began to rain quite heavily in the evening. There were even a couple of prolonged rolls of faraway sounding thunder later on. And so we once more have warnings of floods over much of the country. Earlier in the week local radio told us of a team from the council’s environment department who are out every morning at 9am measuring the depth & degree of wetness of the snow lying over the area, so that floods can be more accurately predicted.

At least we are learning to be better prepared for whatever the weather may throw at us next.

That had bin Supererogation

I was woken at about 5:15 this morning by what I groggily thought was the sound of the bin wagon – not right outside but somewhere close by, though sound travels especially well in air which is frozen.

I had drifted back to sleep before I could be sure, but the men had definitely been & gone by 7:15 when I was properly awake & heard a neighbour taking their bin back inside.

I had checked the council’s website on Monday to find that the bin men were not working at all that day but hoped to start again on Tuesday; we should therefore put out our bins as usual, although they would prioritise those uncollected from Monday. They were still there when I got home in the evening.

But to start before the crack of dawn in this way counts as really great service. I hope this is not achieved at the bin men’s expense – eg by not paying them for uncollected bins, even when circumstances are beyond their control.

Outlines of trees

It snowed again overnight – only an inch or two; we have had it easy compared to those living further south, east or far to the north.

Nor is it the same sort of snow we have had for the past few bad winters. Rather than frozen hard it is powdery, soft, & gleaming white. And the temperature has never dropped much below zero, even over night, so it has not turned to ice which can be so ttreacherous underfoot.

This morning it must have been a couple of degrees above zero because even just the light traffic in the lane outside the house had been enough to melt the snow away to leave the surface clear.

It stayed deep on the pavements however, though nice & easy to walk on – until I got to the part where some idiot had cleared the snow from the access to their double driveway, just by pushing the snow to the sides & leaving it piled in two ridges all the way across to the kerb. Pedestrians had no alternative but to step out into the road to navigate their way around these.

Another problem is a kind of snow blindness caused by the intense whiteness. Thankfully all this raising & lowering of kerb edges in the name of disabled access has another side benefit – you know you can cross at one of those points without the risk of turning your ankle as you put it down hard on the hidden edge of the curb.

And the world looks beautiful, with the tree branches all silhouetted in white.

Snow

First snow of the winter today. It was falling quite heavily during the morning, the radio was warning that all the high roads were difficult or closed, & some town centres blocked by skidding cars or lorries losing traction on a hill.

By the time I left home the sky was gunmetal grey, the air damp but without precipitation, the road & pavements merely wet – again.

I’m grateful, really not relishing the prospect going into battle with ice & snow. Perhaps I should just become a sensible old lady & stay indoors when that happens.

The rain came on more heavily

I was surprised & not a little disappointed that the rainfall records against which the wetness of 2012 is being judged date back only about a century to 1910: surely we have records which go back much further?

Paul Simons came to my aid in his Weather Eye column in Monday’s Times.

There is indeed an archive going all the way back to 1766, which is held by the Met Office, but it has not been digitised – which I take to mean has not been put on to a computer database. Which makes one wonder why not – it does not sound as though it can be all that large, since it is based on fewer weather stations, though that of course presents problems of comparability with the wider coverage of the more modern archive. There may also be a major challenge with digitising in the sense I was first introduced to the word, in the context of computer mapping, that is giving an accurate location based on Ordnance Survey co-ordinates.

However this older archive deprives 2012 (in England & Wales as opposed to the UK), of its record as the wettest ever.

1872 was our wettest year, in fact the whole period around the 1870s was ‘drenched’ according to Simons.

This chimes with my impression gained when reading all those contemporary newspapers of that period – reports of awful rainstorms figured quite regularly, often accompanied by scary thunder & lightning, something which we were largely spared last year.

Heavy rain could cause much more disruption back then, given the lack of protection for travellers.

With modern windscreen wipers, tyres, & generally leak-proof vehicles we have it easy.

At least the mid-Victorians had the Macintosh to protect them, patented in the 1820s & manufactured in Manchester. Strangely however the Dictionary of National Biography says that sales declined after the coming of the railways left passengers less exposed than they had been on the stagecoach.

Related posts
Forecasting technology
One record not broken in 2012
Mapping the way

One record not broken in 2012

News that 2012 was only the second wettest year in the UK, in just over the century since comparable records began, set me wondering how they calculate the average for the whole country – divide by the number of rain gauges, or attempt some more sophisticated adjustment to represent per unit of land area?

In any case it is clear that averages are less interesting than ever as measures of rainfall these days. It is the change in variability & perhaps too the shape of the distributions of rainfall – over units of time, space, intensity which are plainly of interest now. Forget model building & hypothesis testing, let’s just have some good old fashioned comprehensive & careful description.

Links
Met Office Statistics for December and 2012 - is the UK getting wetter?
Related posts
Seasoned by weather
The rain it raineth
Low flying cloud
Patchy rain

Slipping in the rain

All this rain has caused us a real headache now. They are having to work to avert landslips down the steep sides on to the A6 at a place called Barmoor Clough. Causing long tail backs & traffic chaos.

Local traders are claiming a seriously detrimental effect on their vital Christmas trade.

Bus users do not know how long they will have to wait in the rian for a bus – make up your own timetable, it’s anyone’s guess, & the poor bus drivers are getting it in the neck.

When I went searching the web for a picture I found that Barmoor Clough has a bit of a history of disaster.

Links
Buxton railway line history
Sandi Toksvig on coping with a crisis
Barmoor Clough - 1959
Related post
Snowbound

Frost

We had the first real frost of this winter last night. Even at midday the tops of gates & the entire should-be green surface of front lawns shaded from the sun were still hoar & rimed with grey.

Fortunately it had not been cold enough to freeze the puddles, nor to make for treacherous going underfoot