A Trip Home From Church With The Compliments of The Principal

We are quite partial to the English musical comedy duo Flanders and Swan. Possibly partly for this reason, at our faculty farewell John Woodhouse (Principal of Moore College) serenaded us with their homage to English weather. (As Principal he, of course, didn’t do the serenading himself. He outsourced it. To a CD of Flanders and Swan):

January brings the snow
Makes your feet and fingers glow

February's Ice and sleet
Freeze the toes right off your feet

Welcome March with wintry wind
Would thou wer't not so unkind

April brings the sweet spring showers
On and on for hours and hours

Farmers fear unkindly May
Frost by night and hail by day

June just rains and never stops
Thirty days and spoils the crops

In July the sun is hot
Is it shining? No, it's not

August cold, and dank, and wet
Brings more rain than any yet

Bleak September's mist and mud
Is enough to chill the blood

Then October adds a gale
Wind and slush and rain and hail

Dark November brings the fog
Should not do it to a dog

Freezing wet December then:
Bloody January again!

So far we’ve had rain. Far more rain in our couple of weeks here then we have seen in Australia in the last couple of years. That’s a fairly obvious recurring motif in the song. All the rain tends to make things a bit dank and wet. The maximum temperature this Saturday is forecast to be 2. Yes, you read that right. We could safely classify that as ‘cold’. The sun now sets around 4:00pm in the afternoon. By 5pm it looks like 8pm in Sydney. So that would cover August’s cold, and dank, and wet with more rain.

Mist is a fairly common occurrence, and is simply glorious. All the rain means a good degree of mud. That’s September covered.

We had to go to the hospital last week for a pregnancy related check-up (news was all good) and at 7:30am there was the most amazing fog blanketing the area in and around our home. Not sure if you shouldn’t do that to a dog, but then the English do seem fairly precious about their canines. We’ll tick November off.

That just leaves October.

We’ve had the odd gale (especially in Cardiff, the wind must have been coming straight off the very cold ocean). There’s wind fairly regularly (wind and rain is not the best combination I can think of. We’ve had occasions when we almost couldn’t keep the umbrellas up to keep out the cold wet rain).

And then, on the way home from church on Sunday night, we struck something new. It had been raining on our way to church and throughout the service. On our way back to catch the bus home we had our umbrellas out as it seemed to be raining again. But something didn’t seem right about the way the rain moved in the wind when the light caught it—it seemed more responsive to the moving of the air. It was also very, very cold. And then, dripping off the end of my umbrella we noticed it. Ice mixed with water. Slush!

Somehow it made the freezing, windblown and wet conditions magical. The last time I saw slush…actually I don’t remember ever seeing it ‘rain’ slush. (I have eaten a ‘slushie’, I’m not sure if that counts for partial points.) We turned to each other (as we raced to the heated bus, I may have mentioned the cold) and grinned. Two idiotic Aussies enjoying some of England’s worst weather.

It was a great gift of God for the way home from church.

It was much better than the other possibility mentioned under the litany for October. Hail.

But I’m still going to buy a very warm and waterproof overcoat this week. And talk my budget conscious wife into getting one for herself as well. MDB