Weatherwise

Most of the time, weather just is. Until it inconveniences or excites us into paying attention. Then it invades our conversations, influences our intentions, our wardrobe choices, our moods, maybe even our destinies. As it has this week.

Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were no doubt equally obsessed, as they stood around grunting about the weder - the then word for weather. First used in 795AD, weder was the Nordic handle for air, sky, wind, and its manifestations. Primarily fishers and farmers (growing wheat and barley to make bread and beer), their lives were harsh, basic and hazardous in ways which we prefer not to imagine. In the absence of meteorological forecasting, they had to proffer endless wheedling appeasements to the mighty gods that managed the weder and thereby their precarious existence. Thor was the god of their sky, as of thunder and lightning and agriculture - a pretty powerful portfolio.

In 54BC Julius Caesar’s planned invasion of Britain was thwarted by weather - by gales. He had obviously neglected to assuage Jupiter (who was in charge of his Roman skies - also specialising in lightning), who got a thorough walloping by our skylord, the cross and windy Thor. Then in 1588, the Spanish armada of 130 warships bent on mischief in England, were first outwitted by Drake, before facing ultimate defeat by a fierce and sudden North Sea storm that sank a third of them. Mierda pasa.

In 1812, Napoleon assembled over 600,000 men to invade Russia ( history intrigues in its patterns: his aims to liberate Poland, and to stop Russia trading with the UK) but he became seriously unstuck in his attempt to invade Moscow when the temperature dropped to 40 below zero, killing 50,000 horses in one day, and ultimately wiping out a third of his soldiers. Strange to relate that a sudden plunge in temperature also thwarted Hitler’s attempt to invade Russia in 1941. One wonders which god Russia then favoured.

The history of the United States is riddled with significant alternative outcomes on account of unexpected extremes of cold, snow, heat, fog, flood and storms. Yet on this side of the Atlantic, on June 6th 1944, serendipity granted a brief window of benign weather in the English Channel that so changed the outcome of the second World War with the phenomenon that was D-Day.

Just like every other species on our planet, we, like our ancestors, must constantly adjust and adapt to the whims of the weather gods. Sometimes they team up with mother nature to remind us of our place in the glorious scheme of things, and when they really let rip, they challenge our complacencies and our arrogances, and recharge our dormant souls with a generous shot of awe and wonder.

I recently came across an old diary entry from October 2017, when the UK was visited by a strange storm named Ophelia. Up amongst the ancient landscape of Strata Florida, she thrilled me …

Our jumble sale climate gives every day its own subtle seasoning, each to be savoured for what it offers, but yesterday was memorable, when Ophelia gatecrashed a hitherto complacent autumn weekend. A warm spicy silence and an alien jaundiced sky forewarned of her arrival. The trees were soon caught napping, when an advance guard of cocky gusts pranced amongst them, plucking their brightest leaves to strew before their mistress. 

Ophelia herself finally erupted deliriously out of the south, intoxicated and incontinent after too long at sea, and bloated with acquired exotic dust. She headed straight for the woods, where now the trees huddled and quaked, shedding their remaining finery which she swept before her whilst snatching down branches and ripping off layers of bark as she passed.

Unable to resist the urge to merge with such flagrant elementals, I took to the fields. Warm dense gusts immediately ambushed me, tugging and shoving at me like schoolyard bullies. They snatched my glasses and slung them over the hedge, and as I protested they crammed thick spicy air into my mouth, my stomach, my shallow lungs. Thus baptised, thus recruited, I became part of the gang, towed along in a huge flurry of leaves and cosmic debris, lurching and loud-laughing around the fields until I could finally escape their clutches in the lea of a tall hedgerow. My legs ached, my ears hummed, my skin vibrated, as I sank into the mossy embrace of an old oak tree and listened to her shush and swish above me in the language of an ocean. Later, I would sleep deep and dream of strange exotic worlds.

This morning, in bland low sunlight, I shared my toast and honey on the doorstep with the weary bumble bee that was clinging to the gate. United in sticky serenity, we agreed that days like Ophelia's make us all feel equally small and humble and so deliciously alive.

Weather is wonderful, weather is life, weather is to be celebrated. Climate change, however, is a very different beast, massive, systemic and fearsome. Climate change has driven all evolution here on earth. It ended the reign of the mighty dinosaurs, it triggered the rise of the mammals, and ultimately our own emergence. This time around, it is we who are being shown the door, by a growing fury of old sky gods. Our species now has to accept considerable responsibility for cumulative negligence, exploitation and greed. If we don’t rapidly adjust our consumptions and our assumptions, the punishment will accelerate. We are the most magnificent, resourceful and adaptable species ever, but seems we have forgotten the basic rules of good housekeeping, and we have lost - or maybe rejected - our innate connectedness with all things great and small. Too many peoples and fellow species are already being forced from their homes by drought, fire, flood, famine and wars. Wars over intolerances, wars over resources. 

If we don’t change our ways soon, the old gods may do it for us.