Weather I: Reflections on a Week of English Weather

It had to happen. We had to do a blog entry on the weather sooner or later. Everyone knows how terrible the English weather is.

Except we’ve really enjoyed it so far. Admittedly we’ve been here less than a week and it isn’t winter, but it has been really refreshing. It’s been mostly cool, with rapid changes from sunshine to gloomy clouds to pouring rain to light rain to wind to sunshine. In less than three hours. Basically the weather is in transit all the time and if you were bored you could just watch the weather change, which would no doubt prove more interesting (not to mention more edifying) than daytime TV (presumably, we are not prepared to pay for a license to watch TV at this stage).

But there is a crispness and dampness in the air which characterises Sydney weather at its absolute best but seems to be fairly standard here. This is one of the reasons we enjoy it. The other reason is that we particularly take pleasure in gloomy weather, and actually derive energy from it.

We have learned not to share our enjoyment with the English, who are perturbed by anyone appreciating the weather (or the squirrels, but that is a matter for another time). The weather is always bad to the English and the only possible reaction is to complain about it or commiserate with their complaints. As we can’t in all good conscience do this we are in the process of coming up with socially acceptable ways to respond. This is still a work in progress but, given the number of weather conversations we have had in the past week we will need to invent some responses quickly! JMB