Turned Out Nice Again

by Richard Mabey

  But it has never been as straightforward as that for me. When I first started a nature diary I began to find notes on my spells of weather malaise were sneaking in among records of the arrival of summer migrants and the autumn leaf-colour change. It didn’t take me long to spot that the symptom clusters often appeared at the same time, sometimes even the same days each year, like those annually recurrent spells of weather known as ‘Buchan’s Periods’. I began to feel like a seasonally driven-organism myself. If, as I often persuaded myself, I’d got the winter blues, then I’d often got the April, midsummer and autumnal blues, too.

  When this all became entangled with a bout of real depression in my middle age, I discussed it with my psychiatrist, a lean Scot with an uncompromisingly direct approach. He was dismissive of my self-diagnosis: ‘It’s not your biochemistry that’s off, laddie. You just don’t like what’s happening out there.’ And he was partly right. When I’m straight with myself, I can see my bouts of weather unease have a lot to do with the crushing of expectations. I know the kind of events that act as triggers now. I find bumble-bees frozen to the crocuses on the first day of spring. The swifts fail to arrive on time, blocked themselves by low pressure over the continent, and Ted Hughes’s famous cheer from the terraces, ‘They’re back, which means the globe’s still working …’ – becomes an anxious cry in the wind. The re-enactment of seasonal weather events, of that proper order of things that anchors us not just in the present moment but in the long rhythm of our lives, breaks down too often for comfort. Who wouldn’t get depressed! Seasonal affective disorders may be biochemical in part, but they are also cognitive. They’re about our interpretations of ‘what’s happening out there’, about the tarnishing of childhood memories, about dashed hopes and lost moorings.

  But our memories are fallible, our belief that there is a proper order of things hugely over-simplified, and our interpretation of what we are experiencing often emotionally warped and highly selective.

  Nothing demonstrates the subjectivity of our responses more effectively than fog. It is the very stuff of hallucination and illusion, as shape-shifting and ambiguous as our own feelings. I once saw a shadow image of myself cast by the low sun against a bank of fog. It was huge and melodramatic. The nineteenth-century Surrey diarist, George Sturt, wrote a note about an early December mist that is fearful and claustrophobic, but also thrillingly portentous, as if, through the vapour, he is sensing the first cogs of the winter solstice beginning to mesh. ‘Towards dark, a colourless fog, snow almost gone, and ground soft-oozy underfoot, as though the earth’s skin slipped as you trod. A very dark night: no wind; church bells dinning and myself chilly and afraid of the misty evening.’

  Nineteenth-century painters were less sensitive to the dark side of fog. It was simply one of their special effects. Moments before he died in 1851, Turner, weather artist extraordinary, was found on his bedroom floor, trying to reach his window to look out at the River Thames. His doctor reported that, just before 9am, ‘the sun broke through the cloudy curtain which so long had obscured it splendour, and filled the chamber of death with a glory of light.’ That cloud was the pall of soot and sulphur-saturated fog (later christened ‘smog’) that blanketed London during its nineteenth century hey-day as an industrial city. Painters adored London fog for the way it misted rough-edged city scenes into essays in Impressionism, for its magical softening of detail. It lured Claude Monet over from France. He told his dealer ‘what I love more than anything is the fog’. James McNeill Whistler thought the evening smog clothed ‘the riverside with poetry’, transforming factory chimneys into Italian bell-towers, warehouses into palaces, so that ‘the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us’. Out in the non-fairy landscape, of course, people were dying of asphyxiation, a situation that was allowed to continue until the notorious London smog of December 1952, during which more than 4,000 people are believed to have died as a direct consequence of the fatal combination of soot, sulphur dioxide and cold.

  Both visions – the streaked, shifting, glowing fog in Turner’s London paintings (Constable called it ‘tinted steam’) and the suffocating pall out in the streets – are true in their different ways. Weather is a kind of Rorsharch test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

  And now, each day, we have the ink-blot test administered to us virtually, in the shape of the forecast, a ritual which has a significance in our mythology far beyond that of simply predicting the weather. Of course, it’s principally a practical tool, made increasingly accurate with the advent of giant computers which can access and analyse second by second changes in pressure and temperature from all over the planet. Manufacturers of ice-cream and umbrellas trust its long term predictions enough to base their seasonal production quotas on it. So do we – at least for a few days in advance – and are willing to use it to make choices about which day to go for ramble at the weekend, or whether to take a raincoat to work tomorrow.

  But beyond that, our enthralment with it edges into the realm of magic. The forecast has become an oracle and, like all soothsayers, we regard it not just as a source of guidance, but as a scapegoat, a focus for blame when things go wrong. The forecast gives us the opportunity to be as moody as children in front of it. It’s an overseeing parent, suggesting how we should behave, recommending spells of gating, reminding us that we are not remotely grown-up or clever enough to have any power or control over the elemental events it is reporting. If its prognostications go badly wrong, we feel we’re entitled to throw a tantrum and to blame the forecast (sometimes even the hapless forecaster) rather than the vagaries of the weather itself. When it is right, as it is more often than not, it’s no more than we expect of a responsible parent. But even a correct bad forecast still leaves its damp stigmata on the hands of the messenger who delivered it.

  So there is a touch of irony in the fact that the very first weather forecasts, which began at a time when superstition held real power, were delivered without our modern magic shows of swooping technicolour pressure fronts and meteorological abracadabra, and in the simplest of ways for the most practical of purposes. I have a copy of The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules, first published in 1676, which gives guidance on how to interpret atmospheric signs to foretell imminent weather patterns. The only computing system the good shepherd had access to was an acute eye downloading to a memory bank stretching back over half a lifetime. But it enabled him to make predictions of risk-taking precision: ‘A general Mist before the Sun rises, near the full Moon – Fair Weather.’ I have no idea whether the Banbury’s shepherd’s system was statistically valid, but it was based on the same empirical principles as modern forecasting. It never assumed it could help us defeat the weather, but it might enable us to stay one step ahead.

  But in 1652, just twenty-four years earlier, the definitive edition of Thomas Hill’s hugely popular manual, The Gardener’s Labyrinth, passed on oracular tips which were precisely about how to turn the weather around. They were based on the ancient principles of sympathetic magic, the idea that like counters like. Firing a gun would disperse thunderstorms. Hanging the ominous pelt of a seal at the entrance of the garden would keep dark clouds away. My favourite is the suggestion that sowing the infamously flatulent seeds of lentil in the vegetable beds would keep them immune from damage by wind.

  The progress of forecasting followed pretty much in the pragmatic tradition of the Banbury shepherd. One offshoot was the detailed weather diary of the kind kept by Gilbert White. In 1767, one of his correspondents, Daines Barrington, devised a printed journal proforma, with columns on wind, general weather, plants first in flower and various miscellaneous detail. Its stated purposes were clear, and utilitarian: ‘it may also be proper’ Barrington advised the journal-keeper, ‘to take notice of the common prognostics of the weather from animals, plants or hygroscope … and from many such journals kept in different parts of the kingdom, perhaps the very best and accurate materials for a General Natural Hi
story of Great Britain may be in time expected, as well as many profitable improvements and discoveries in agriculture.’ Recently, through detailed analysis of these and more recent records it’s been discovered that averaging-out descriptions of weather at a given moment of the year is a more accurate predictor of weather now, than the attempt to decipher up-to-the minute reports of the atmosphere’s chaotic games.

  A crucial difference between these written ‘prognostics’ and modern forecasts is that they preserved the archaeology of the weather. We barely have a weather memory anymore. We imagine lost meteorological fairy-lands and forget the real good times. We turn vague recollections of the routine muddle of poor weather into catastrophic visions of the future. Who now remembers that the summer of 1975 was as long and hot as that of 1976? Snow stopped play at a cricket game in Colchester on 2 June, 1975, but four days later one of the great halcyon summers began. The reason we only remember the summer of 1976 is because, in our doleful weather folk-memory, it was accompanied, mordanted, by a drought.

  4

  HALCYON DAYS

  IN MEDITERRANEAN MYTHOLOGY, the kingfisher (alkuon in Greek) was believed to incubate its eggs on the surface of the sea, during the spell in November when water and weather were always calm, and which was later known as St Martin’s Little Summer. The phrase ‘halcyon days’ subsequently began to be used for any periods of peace and general happiness – and, because these are so often dependent on the weather, for those blue remembered days in which sunshine and bliss are inseparable.

  But we shouldn’t forget the role of the kingfisher in this, that spark of iridescent azure and cinnamon that is like a flash of fair-weather lightning. In these post-mythological times, of course, kingfishers tend not to raise their young in autumnal, waterborne nests. But one September morning in the Norfolk Broads, a fledgling perched briefly on our boat as we were having breakfast, just feet from our scrambled eggs. The day that followed wasn’t the least bit exceptional in terms of its weather, but it became halcyon because of the benediction of that small flighted rainbow. The kingfisher stood in for the sun, becoming a thread in that complex weave of metaphor, ancient association and real physical experience through which we make sense of the weather, and its effect on our feelings.

  And because these associations are so personal you can have a halcyon day at any time of the year, and probably in any weather. Coleridge, overjoyed by fatherhood, decreed in the exquisite poetic benediction to his sixteen-month-old son Hartley entitled ‘Frost at Midnight’, that every day should be halcyon to him:

  Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to

  thee,

  Whether the summer clothes the

  general earth

  With greenness, or the redbreast sit

  and sing

  Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare

  branch …

  Even when the weather has been incessantly miserly, you can make a halcyon day from a widow’s glimmering mite. The winter of 1979 was notorious for its relentless gloom. On 22 February, I was walking down London’s Lower Regent Street, that shadowy chasm of tall buildings, when the sun suddenly peeped through the clouds for the first time in weeks. Quite spontaneously, almost everyone stepped off the pavement into the thin ribbon of watery sunshine in the road, giggling like children in delighted surprise. I’m pretty sure I recall a few brief dance twirls being executed too.

  And as the year progresses we all have our personal halcyon moments. On 19 April, 1873, John Ruskin logged an ‘Entirely Paradise of a day, cloudless and pure till 5; then East wind a little, but clearing for twilight. Did little but saunter among primroses and work on beach.’ I suppose that sums up a climatic Shangri-La most of us would be happy to inhabit. It’s the kind of day when we tumble into hyperbole: ‘Aah, it was like the First Day of the World!’ But one of my spring halcyons, in 2003, was a bit more like the Day before the First Day, as if I’d somehow sneaked a glimpse of seasonal evolution still a bit short on its finishing touches.

  I need to fill in a little background here. Years ago, when I first began to be fascinated by plants, I came across an obscure scientific conceit, a measure of the advance of spring across the land based on the average first dates on which common wild-flowers first come into bloom. Different species flower at times determined by a combination of temperature, rainfall, sunlight and day-length – all the elements that add up to a micro-climate. So, a species – primrose, let’s say – that first blooms in mid-April in the sheltered combes of Dorset will be opening simultaneously in the Gulf Stream breezes on the Pembrokeshire coast, and the warm ‘urban envelope’ of Kew Gardens. Yet on the exposed scarp of the North Downs, only twenty miles south, it may not be open for another fortnight, and it will be a full three weeks before it graces the windswept hills of Dartmoor and Snowdonia. The lines joining these points of floral coincidence are known as isophenes, and from them it’s possible to calculate that spring travels north and east across flat ground at roughly two miles an hour – walking pace in fact, so that it’s possible to indulge the fantasy of following it on foot, the guest behind the unrolling carpet.

  But spring 2003 had an uncomfortable, out-of-sorts feel about it, at least in the heads of a lot of us. The day before the equinox, the West, always eager to trump nature, invaded Iraq. I felt in need in some kind of seasonal retribution, ‘a shot at redemption,’ as Paul Simon put it. So the next morning, 21 March, I decided I would walk west from my Suffolk house and meet the spring head-on, as if it might not reach me otherwise.

  I guess I was hoping for a straightforward halcyon, a gorgeous bird of a day, like the fabulous creature which had hatched in the eastern Mediterranean in one of its happier moods. What I found instead was more honestly untidy and indisputably English. The weather itself was typical for March – mild and bright, with a sharp wind blowing from the west, straight in my face. But the isophenes were as tangled as a mad cat’s cradle. Celandines and marsh marigolds were in full-bloom on south-facing ditch banks, but barely in bud in frost hollows just yards away. The shady lanes were still busy with winter birds, but when I reached the open sheepwalks of Breckland, there were ‘sweeing’ lapwings overhead, and the first brimstone and peacock butterflies. I’d sauntered twelve miles west in six hours, so had got no more than half a day deeper into spring. But the micro-landscapes – and their micro-climatic familiars – were so diverse, such a convolution of tumps and dells and thickets, that I’d travelled through about two months of biological weather. It felt a small snub to the violent levelling happening 2,000 miles behind me.

  Jan Morris also experienced a political halcyon, a climatic metaphor, in the gilded spring and summer of 1990, which she saw as a fitting farewell to the decade that had given us Chernobyl and monetarism. Nelson Mandela was freed, the Berlin Wall came down, summer birds and prodigious insects swarmed through the blazing sun of May, and on her own day of days, Morris watched seventy-seven pipistrelle bats fly out of their roost above the kitchen of her Welsh cottage. Those days she wrote, were ‘an allegorical moment of reconciliation … through which all too briefly flickered a message that the worst might be over.’

  Of course it wasn’t over, nor did 1990 presage a run of New Age weather. As so often, we British have had to continue scratching for halcyon moments in improbable situations, often by being willing to laugh at our fantasies and the all too frequent ghastliness of our climatic lot.

  Sometimes such moments are the stuff of pure farce. On 3 July, 1996, play in the men’s quarter-finals at Wimbledon, epicentre of the English summer, had to be abandoned for almost the entire day because of torrential rain. Cliff Richard, well-known as a tennis nut, happened to be in the covered part of the Centre Court, and the organisers, liberated from their usual reserve by desperation, had the wheeze of asking him to sing for the increasingly bored and bedraggled crowd. There followed two hours of surreal vaudeville, with the computerised scoreboard printing out the lyrics as Cliff belted out his hits, accompanied by a scrat
ch WLTA backing group led by Martina Navratilova, and a Centre Court crowd by then in full carnival mood.

  We should never forget that the halcyon is a water bird.

  My own best halcyon day, perhaps one of the most idyllic of my life, was also involved with water, but had a twist in the tail. It was the mid 1970s, and I was in the north-west of Scotland with the late, great photographer Tony Evans, looking for the alpine wildflowers we had so dismally failed to locate up in the mountains. The alchemy of the isophenes sometimes brings them down to sea-level and we struck lucky by the shores of Loch Linnhe – tight tufts of yellow saxifrage and drifts of succulent-leaved roseroot ringed the great lagoon, and we sprawled out among them. It was a day of the purest Highland light, no wind, the sky an almost opalescent blue. Tony set up his camera on a bank about fifty feet above the loch and I went down to the edge, to lay a bottle of white wine to cool in the water, marking its position, if I remember right, with a sock. We lounged there most of the day. I held an elegant white parasol over the camera to shield Tony’s fragile gelatine filters from the spray of a waterfall close to our chosen saxifrage. A seal, barking quietly, swam up the loch, and, one hour later, swam back again. By mid-afternoon it was almost too hot to work and we were relieved when we finally got the shot in the bag. Never has the prospect of a chilled Chablis seemed so ambrosial, and I went down to the loch-edge to retrieve the bottle, only to find it – and the sock marker – had vanished. I’d failed to take into account the fact that Loch Linnhe was tidal and that our now urgently-needed refreshment was, in essence, fifty metres out to sea. We spotted it eventually with our binoculars, glinting mockingly deep in the water and, as wine-steward for the day, I had the duty of retrieving it, a task which involved a breath-stopping dive under water twenty-five degrees cooler than the bank of wild thyme we had been basking on.