And So Into Summer

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Ian

Every year, when the days start to heat up, it feels like a liberation that some strange part of me worries might never come. But it’s here now, as inevitable as any season. May turns into June with barely a second thought. The wind swings around to the south, blowing hot from foreign lands. It rises, too, tickling the tops of trees but bringing no relief to those on the ground under the scorching sun.

Temperatures drift inexorably towards the thirties. The gorse flowers have faded and gone, passing their torch to the buttercups in the meadows and the cow parsley that crowds every hedgerow and riverbank.

Winter and Spring have had their day. Now it is time for Summer; king of seasons, our season. It is time for deep blue skies and endless green fields. It is time for the smell of barbecues and the salty sea. It is time for the sound of parched heath underfoot and the calls of swallows in the cool evening air.

It is time to run, and play, and swim, and laugh, and dance between the hot sand and the blazing sky.

Summer is here.

Easter’s Approach

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Ian

Not too many years ago, Easter fell early in the month of April. I spent it camping in a blizzard somewhere near Birmingham, packing in as many people as our tent would hold so that we wouldn’t freeze overnight. My choice to spend the daylight hours running around a frozen muddy field in a hakama was also, with hindsight, not the best of all possible choices.

Years have passed, and this time around, Easter falls late. The lilac trees are already in bloom, while cherry blossoms and dandelion seeds tumble in the wind.

Even at eight in the morning, the sun is high in the sky and the mist is boiling away. Blue skies overhead promise a beautiful day, hot and cloudless, just like dozens more to come.

It’s April, then it will be May. The holidays are here, the tourists are here to pack the beaches. Slowly but surely, Spring is becoming Summer once more.

Cobb’s Quay Weather

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Ian

Cobb’s Quay in Poole Harbour has a crappy Flash-only front-end to its weather station. My “Cobb’s Quay Weather” page grabs the data files behind the Flash, and displays the important bits with minimal formatting, e.g. for mobile browsers.

Made for a friend of mine who couldn’t get the Flash interface to work from his phone.

Note: Temperature readings seem to be broken at the moment (April 2011). This is an issue with the source data, not my script.

You can:

A Day Snowbound

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Ian

The weather, like the best of muses, is capricious and arbitrary.

Yesterday I had no problem at all catching buses and trains to get from our home to Guildford, a good hundred miles away. Guildford was under 3-4 inches of snow, complete with the requisite ice underneath, so using the pushchair was a challenge — but we made it.

This morning, an inch fell on Bournemouth. And paralysed it.

The photo below is Queens Road this morning, which naturally, the council have not gritted. Of course not, I mean, it’s only a 1-in-5 hill on a bus route. Why would they want to grit that?

With my carpool absent, rail services reduced and no buses going my direction as far as I could tell, I gave up and for lack of anything better to do, started gritting Queens Road myself. See that non-snowy bit? That’s a productive morning right there.

Big Society, bitches!

So, no work for me today, and since my laptop is also at work, I can’t pretend to be working from home. On the other hand, a lot of drivers looked pretty happy — and the falling snow has been replaced by rain, so hopefully the town will have resumed normal service again tomorrow.

A Farewell to Summer

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Ian

The day began with mist rolling in over the sea, but before long it turned to morning drizzle and on into a rainy afternoon; big, lazy raindrops falling in patches from the sky. Then as evening came the mist rolled in once more, cloaking everything in dampness and white. Here by the shores of the English Channel, this is how autumn begins.

Though it will return in patches over the coming month, brief flickers and shadows of July’s heat, the summer that was is now gone. It was a summer of travel and of dodging the rain, a summer of remembering the past and of making plans for the future. It held what might be my last RABIES, what may be my last summer in Galicia, and what almost certainly will be my last summer as an unmarried man.

So now, as the light dims and dies for another year, bring on harvest and Hallowe’en, bring on the howling winds and driving rain, bring on coats and inside-out umbrellas and mugs of warm cider by the fire. Soon it will be summer once more, and everything will be different.

Endings and Midwinter

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Ian

Winter has well and truly closed in, with black ice laying in sheets across the roads, scarf and gloves on, and “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” stuck on a permanent loop in my head. I had Cliff Richard’s “Mistletoe and Wine” in there this morning, though, so John and Yoko are definitely a step up.

For all that “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” has hopeful lyrics, it’s always seemed to me one of the saddest of all Christmas songs. It reminds me of the odd feeling that things are ending – saying goodbye to colleagues as you leave work for the holidays, wishing a Merry Christmas to the staff of shops and cafés you frequent… It feels like sort of like a permanent ending, even though we’ll all be back at work in two weeks’ time, and my café and takeaway habit will continue unabated over the Christmas season.

Perhaps it’s a remaining echo of my time at University, where holidays meant we all scattered back to family homes, leaving each other behind. These days we’re scattered for good, as far apart as the four winds, but somehow holidays are still lonelier.

It’s dark now, deep into the longest night of the year. Time to raise a glass to the Winter, to light a fire upon the hearth and look forward to lengthening days once again. To those friends of mine who celebrate such days, have a very merry Winter solstice night! To everyone else, you’ve still got four days left to go!

Cold November Rain

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Ian

The rain here is not falling or even pouring. It is constant, pervasive. As you look into the grey mist a hundred metres away in all directions, if you’re lucky, you can make out the merest hint of an angle to signify the way the squally wind is buffeting the maelstrom.
I left work early in order to do some photography this afternoon. With hindsight, of course, this was a silly plan. Even sillier my lack of coat and umbrella today – the thrice-damned weather forecast, of course, promised only drizzle. I wore my heavy-weather trials gear on the half-hour walk to the station, but to my regret I only bothered to take the jacket.
Net result: my upper body is baking hot – the gear is designed for much colder and wetter things than dry land can provide – while my trousers now stick uncomfortably to my legs and drip puddles into my boots.
Next time the weather is bad enough for me to get the foulies out, I must remember to take the trousers, gloves and wellies too. Or a taxi. Maybe I should just remember to take a taxi.

Only Dreaming

Tag Archives: Weather