Winnie the Pooh weather!

As Winnie the Pooh would say, it’s a blustery day. Out in the garden I can see one of the more flimsy trees almost bending double with the force of the wind, and a little while ago the door of the summer house blew open with a tremendous crash which sent the dog into a frenzy of barking because, of course, the summer house is her usual day time luxury residence when we are at work.

The cats have hardly ventured out for days, slinking into the garden for a pee only when they absolutely have to at a still, dry moment and then being blown back in with their tails aloft, looking somewhat undignified and scruffy.

The dog quite likes it, chasing around after leaves, pieces of paper and other detritus which people have left lying about and which the wind is picking up and throwing all over the street. Where the black plastic with which we have covered the vegetable beds has blown loose, she dances round it, barking enthusiastically and trying to bite it (very ineffectually, I might add) wearing herself out in the process and going to sleep with her little legs twitching and nose flicking to and fro in excited dreaming (I have chucked her outside several times today and so she has had plenty of opportunity to do this. Last night she stole and ate four bananas from the kitchen counter and she now has terrible wind!)  

We have had it quite easy in the south east of England of course, as our friends in the north have had more snow, rain and gales than they care to think about in a remarkably short space of time. But then it happens fairly regularly up there and they’re tough aren’t they? As northerners are fond of saying, “You lot are soft down south”.

There’s no doubt that the weather is changing, and of course that will start up the climate change lobby again lecturing us on our carbon emissions from cars, planes, patio heaters and all sorts of other convenient but climatically unfriendly things. But the big debate is not whether the climate is changing, because it undoubtedly is, but whether it is anything to do with what we are doing, or whether it is part of a long term natural cycle of change which occurs every few hundred or thousand years. Or both. I guess that no matter how many scientific studies there are, we will never know for sure. And in our lifetimes, the effect will not be too dreadful. Whether it will be in our great grandchildren’s times remains to be seen.

But these things do go in cycles. It is well documented in mediaeval and Tudor times that there were catastrophic floods. It was torrential rains that lasted for weeks and then a flood which defeated Simon de Montfort at his final battle for the English crown about 1300 and something, where as a consequence his troops died of dysentery and water borne diseases, not battle wounds, and several times in the 1500s the Thames froze over due to the extreme cold.

Today the windy weather is made worse by the fact that it is also bitterly cold, although not Thames-freezingly cold. Although the thermometer says two degrees, it must be at least six degrees colder than that with wind chill. Having two open chimneys in the house, the wind swoops down one, round the room, through the door and up the other one, so we have a permanent draught. We could get rid of that by lighting a fire, but seems a little wasteful as I’m out tonight. Better get out the thermals (sexy, eh?) and remember to switch on the electric blanket tonight. Gonna be a chilly one!