In Praise of Bad Weather - Reminiscences

It is terrible weather today: the rain is pouring from the sky as though all the angels of Heaven were weeping buckets; the wind is howling round the house for all the world like the ghosts of the long dead souls who once lived here. Yet despite this, happiness reigns supreme. To walk through sheets of rain, driven by the wind into the very nooks and folds of your being brings a sense of being alive akin to little else. Having returned home, and now sitting in the warmth of my room, a short homage to the rain and sun of yesteryear strains to be written.

A Wander down Memory Lane

This post is far from what I expected to be writing here, and in truth is probably of little interest to anyone. Despite that, however, it wants me to write it, and as it is vaguely relevant to the subject of the weather, here it is.

For background and context to this post, you may wish to read my introduction: First Steps.

Early on in my time at school, before the weather bug had really sunk its teeth in, my class was taught a short poem:

Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot,
Whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not,
We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

While writing this, I actually looked the poem up, to see whether I needed to give credit to the author, and in doing so discovered that the version that I know is not the normal one:

Whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not,
Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot,
We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not. ~ Anonymous

This is not really material to the story, but I mention it because it is an example of another one of my interests: the evolution of words, sayings and traditional verse through the game of Chinese Whispers that we are constantly playing.

This poem, beside its potential interpretations as a message regarding how we live our lives, illustrates something of our attitude to the weather. There is Good Weather and Bad Weather; the weather can be Fine or it can be Not.

I was born in the Spring, just at the point where the last vestages of Winter weather were past and gone; however for most of my life I have had an Autumn birthday, at the point where the leaves begin to fall in earnest, and going out without a coat can be considered to be foolish. Another lasting memory from my early school days is another poem, this one written by the great Emily Brontë:

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

This poem was a fixture of the week of my birthday, speaking of true, if sad, delight in the coming of winter, so close around the corner. It also spoke to me in a way that the other did not.

It has to be Billy Connolly who made the best statement concerning Bad Weather:

I hate all those weathermen, too, who tell you that rain is bad weather. There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing, so get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little.

From early childhood, the mention of Good and Bad weather has been a deep irritation to me. Some of my fondest memories are of venturing out into wild wind and rain clad in waterproofs and wellies, making runnels and channels from the puddles in the tracks near our house and sitting in the topmost branches of trees swaying in the wind. Likewise, many of my worst are of the hot Summer days when the sun blazes down from the sky and the heat causes a fog in your brain that simply will not lift. To this day, I maintain that there is nothing that brings greater exhiliration and joy in life than being out in the twilight of evening as a thunderstorm rolls in over the hills, scattering the heat of Summer to the four winds and bringing heavy rain and bright, cold air in its wake.

For all that, there is something to be said for a fine, clear day. Few things can be compared to the bright, cold, crispness of the days that can sometimes be found in early January. The wind blowing in from the North, cold enough to burn the skin from your face and bring tears to your eyes. And early Spring, when the daffodils and crocusses poke out from under the hedges and the birds are just beginning to sing once more. A fine, clear day at that time holds so much potential for the year ahead, as birds begin to build their nests, buds burst on the earliest trees, and hares, filled with March madness, run and box in newly sown fields.

I will leave the last words to a poem I have always associated with that time. Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.