Category Archives: Weather

Pardon My French

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Je suis bloody well fed up! For one thing it has been raining all day and it feels more like November than June, so we’ve been stuck in the house. I wonder which is worse, being stuck indoors because it’s cold and miserable or not being able to go out because it’s inhumanely hot? I’m not likely to find out anyway.

Apart from that the book that I started yesterday has turned out to be one of the very few that I’ve given up on. I usually struggle on with books and sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised at the end of them. Other times I just harrumph all the way through and at the end turn it around to look at the front cover, I think I probably have a sort of I’ll know you next time and you’ll never darken my door again look on my face.

Anyway, what with the weather and everything I can’t be doing with that sort of book so I’m ‘shelving’ Margaret Forster’s Diary of an Ordinary Woman at the moment. I’ll go back to it if someone can tell me that it’s worthwhile ploughing on with it. I bought it at the last library book sale.

When I read the introduction I really didn’t like the idea of it at all because it’s a fictional diary purporting to be a real one which was written by a woman who was born in 1901 and she is now 98 years old. Forster even has the fictional woman telling her that she told no lies in her diary – but it’s fiction.

I reached page 87 and so far the whole thing just seems implausible to me. Firstly the diary writer, Millicent is one of a family of seven children, she is the third one and we are supposed to believe that she was allowed to go to teacher training college after leaving school. Considering that the family is not a very wealthy one, the father has some sort of furniture making/selling business which isn’t doing all that well because of the Great War, I seriously doubt if any daughter would even have been allowed to stay on at school past the age of 14. She would have been expected to help with the family budget and would almost certainly have had to work in her father’s shop for pocket money only.

There is an even more unlikely happening involving the mother of the family later on and I can’t suspend my disbelief any more. I also think that it’s the sort of book which could be written by just about anybody who has read a few books and is interested in writing. They’d probably make a better job of it too.

Anyway, grump over.

I’m just starting Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. I have high hopes.

Weather Update

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The weather here has been terrible recently, it hasn’t been too wet but the wind has been scary and quite a few trees were blown down. I thought that my garden had managed to avoid any damage but my biggest Japanese Maple (Acer) withered at the top and on closer inspection I discovered that the top three feet of it had just snapped off but was still entangled in the rest of the tree. I wish I had noticed it earlier because I would have had a better chance of being able to use some of it for cuttings. I took cuttings anyway as it might still work.

Until today it has been cold, it’s difficult to believe that we’ve had May and we’re already in June. However today it was HOT! In fact it was 24oC which is 75oF – very bright and sunny and I planted my home grown tomato plants into the greenhouse border and I’m ever hopeful of a good crop.

What does the weather have in store for us tomorrow though? Can you believe that we are going to be dropping down to 14oC which is 57oF for the forecastable future? No wonder we all get ill with temperature fluctuations like that!

It’s typical holiday weather, we didn’t have last Monday off as everybody else seems to have had. This Monday is our holiday, but I’ve got a horrible feeling that today might just have been our summer. Looking on the bright side, at least I won’t be feeling too hot.

My garden is continuing to bloom and I hope to have some more photos on ‘Pining’ soon. The first rose opened today!

R H S – It must be Summer

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I always think that summer arrives with the Royal Horticultural Show although it isn’t normally accompanied by severe gales for days , as we have had here. Mind you I’m not complaining when you consider what other people have had to put up with weather wise.

I’ve been enjoying watching all of the coverage on the TV and tonight I’ve been voting for my favourite gardens in the two categories of show garden and small garden. It was quite difficult because sonetimes I really like the planting of a garden but for me it’s spoiled by a horrendous monstrosity of a modern structure. Like the big white thing in Ishihara Kazuyuki Design Lab garden. I loved all of the plants and the design apart from that weird structure. I ended up voting for the Skyshades garden in the Show Garden category because it is really natural and would be great for wildlife. It only got a silver medal.

In the Small Garden category I opted for Hae-Woo-So (Emptying One’s Mind) from Korea. It got a gold which I think it deserved, lovely plants, water and a rustic structure which turned out to be an outside loo and a place to wash your hands. So it’s about emptying your body too! If you have time take a look at the gardens and let me know which are your favourites.

Spring – today anyway

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It has been lovely the last few days with bright sunshine and a warmish wind. So I’ve been busy making the most of it, just in case we get snow again at Easter, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I’ve been hard at it in the garden and I’ve even managed to get around to painting the woodwork in Duncan’s old room which I’ve been putting off for ages. The paint tin boasts that it is one coat, quick dry gloss paint. Well, it isn’t and I’ve had to give it two coats, which took forever to dry out.

And you know what it’s like, as soon as you spruce up one part of a house it immediately makes everything else look shabby. The downside of the sun actually shining is that it makes the place seem – I have to admit it – manky!

So I’ve also been washing windows, inside and out. What an exciting life I lead. It should all help to keep me fit anyway. I did take some more garden photos though and I hope to have a garden blogpost tomorrow.

Hard Winters, the Tories and Narnia

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I bet you don’t think that the three things in the title have anything in common, but they do, well I think they do.

I caught the back end of one of the Narnia episodes which were on TV during the Christmas holidays, it was the wicked queen doing her stuff. We used to be steeped in Narnia here as Gordon my youngest son was obsessed with the books and videos at one point. It always reminded me of the winters of 1979/80/81 which were terribly cold, worse than anything that I had ever experienced before.

When we moved down to Essex the diesel in the removal lorry’s tank froze and the men had to light a fire underneath it to thaw it out, scary stuff. This all coincided with the Conservative party getting into power – in the shape of the dreaded and evil Maggie Thatcher. So you can see why she reminds me of the wicked witch – and vice versa. Evil was stalking the land and so freezing cold winters came along to torment us, just as in Narnia when evil had the upper-hand.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the same thing has happened again as we now have the self-confessed ‘sons of Margaret Thatcher’ at the helm. As before, the freezing winter came just before the Tories got into power, when evil was gaining strength. I predict that as we are in the middle of our second freezing winter on the trot, we’ll probably have another one next year too. I blame all those Old Etonian millionaires. But I’m also reminded of Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. Prime Minister Cameron and all his Old Etonian pals in the Cabinet are just exactly like the dastardly Flashman and his chums, except that was set at Rugby. I suppose one English public school bunch is much the same as another.

When J.M. Barrie decided to make his Peter Pan character Captain Hook an evil Old Etonian he obviously knew exactly what he was doing. But I cheer myself up by remembering what was in store for Captain Hook!

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK TOCK

Statistics

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I used to work in an Information and Statistics department in the National Health Service,so I’m well aware that things are often very different from what they would first appear.

Which would explain why the Scottish Government is claiming that the influenza rates are much lower than they were at this time last year. The young people in my own family have been hit badly by the flu this year, from my sister’s grandchildren aged 8 and 10 to my own sons who were ill at Christmas and they are in their 20s. As none of the older folks have succumbed we’re presuming that it is the swine flu.

Duncan got it really badly and by Hogmanay most of his friends had it too. They crawled out of their beds to celebrate the New Year at ‘the bells’ but they didn’t have any energy and Duncan ended up coming home not long afterwards, clutching a bit of coal to bring us good luck for the coming year.

Due to the fact that it all happened over the Christmas period nobody has been to see a doctor, so they won’t appear in any statistics. It can take two weeks to get an appointment anyway, unless they think that you might die, so people tend just to stay at home and cosset themselves until they feel better.

So unless Fife has been more badly hit than the rest of Scotland I think we can take the statistics with a pinch of salt.

I’m also annoyed by the weather statistics because the weather people keep telling us that it should be about 2 or 3 Celsius here but my garden is telling me something very different. It’s still frozen solid and it has been like that since November. It was -12 C in Dunfermline during the day not long ago but according to the weather report it wasn’t anything like that cold.

Apparently it was the coldest December in Scotland since records began 100 years ago. I definitely believe that statistic!

Condensing gas boiler

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We had a new condensing gas boiler installed last year at great expense – £3,500 to be precise. We renewed our boiler because the old one was about 40 years old, very noisy and expensive to run. However when we opted for a condensing boiler (actually British Gas didn’t give us any choice) nobody told us that the damn things seize up in the cold. They sense a blockage and shut down.

Last week we were without heating and hot water for a day because the outlet pipe which drains water from the system to the outside froze up. This is what happens in cold weather apparently!

Have you ever heard of anything so daft? So on the very coldest days when you most need central heating it’s very likely that it won’t be working. There are actually people holding hot water bottles to their boiler pipes in an effort to stop them from freezing.

Despite the fact that the heating has been all day, it still froze up as the temperature plummeted even more this evening. We’re thankful that we have a gas fire in the living room and we’re wrapped in blankets sitting in front of it, taking turns on our Netbook.

At some point we’re going to have to brave our ice-box of a bedroom though. I’m tempted to buy an electric blanket or at least hot water bottles. Even if it does make me feel absolutely ancient.

We’ll be having the family back here for the Christmas/Hogmanay holidays and if the heating freezes up then – you’ll be able to hear me screaming, even if you’re on the other side of the world!

Scottish words: smirr

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We get a lot of rain in Scotland, of all different sorts. I think that smirr is the most annoying kind because when you look out of the window it’s very difficult to see it. It doesn’t really fall like ordinary rain and so it has no sound and if you aren’t careful it’ll fool you into thinking that it’s just another grey, dreich day. But if you venture outside in smirry rain and you aren’t dressed for wet weather – before you know it you’ll be drookit, drenched, right through to your knickers! It reaches places that ordinary rain doesn’t reach.

Smirr seems to be a Scottish phenomenon, my eldest brother has lived in the Netherlands for the whole of his adult life and although it’s damp there too, smirry rain is unknown to them.

In Ian Rankin’s book Black and Blue he describes smirr as being a fine spray-mist, which is a fair description I suppose. I’ve always thought of it as very low transparent cloud. Whatever it is – it’s very wet.

Winter garden

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This is how my garden looked after the first heavy snowfall, as you can see I had hoped to hang some washing out, hence the annoying washing line. I like to get the fresh air at stuff but in the past I’ve had to prise the clothes from the line and prop the stiff as a board washing up against furniture until it thaws.

I think it’s about 6 inches deep here but it did reach about 15 inches and I didn’t venture out in it again after nearly breaking my neck just going out to the bin with rubbish. The snow was solid ice by then. Speaking of which – none of our bins has been emptied for weeks now because of the roads, so fingers crossed that they can get to us this week before the snow hits us again. The forecasters are promising us more snow at the end of the week, and it’s below freezing again.

My greenhouse door is frozen shut. The same thing happened last year and the cold weather went on so long that my oldest cactus plant died. It was quite sad really because I bought it when I was only 11 so it was about 40 years old. The cacti had been fine in there over the whole winter in previous years.

This is a photograph of a local school. If you look carefully at the lower roof you can see the damage which was caused when a lot of thawing snow slipped onto it – £80,000 worth of damage apparently!

Weather update

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I realised that the schools were going to be shut again yesterday (Monday) when I had to make a freezing foray to the loo at 6 o’clock in the morning, and discovered that it was snowing heavily again. We had had very little snow during the whole weekend and hoped that the worst was over, but no such luck. So the schools in Fife were closed for a week and a day. They opened today though which is just as well, it’s all very well having to be closed for a wee while but there are exams coming up and a teaching schedule to work through.

Last night we made our last trip through to Dundee with yet more stuff from Duncan’s room, it’s amazing how much there was. I wasn’t looking forward to the journey, remembering the last time. But D. was back living with us because he didn’t have his computer and needed help with putting his new tv together. He’s sorted out now thankfully.

The roads to Dundee were still ridiculous and we haven’t seen a gritter yet this year. The councils ran out of salt and grit last year because of the very cold and long winter and it looks like they are determined not to run out of them again, in fact they’re just not using the stuff.

The worst of this new snow has fallen on the central region and there have been hundreds of people stranded on the main motorway through Scotland. People have been stuck in their cars for over 24 hours in some places. The problem seems to have started with articulated lorries which jack-knifed in the ice, blocking the roads. I think they’re planning to get the army out there to give a helping hand, I certainly hope so anyway.