Knowing your Onians

As the snow buckets down across England, tonight we in Husborne Crawley will light a paraffin-wax, fossil-fuel tea light in honour of Charles Onians.

I believe that Charles is still a working journalist, although I've not noticed much in the way of his work lately - especially around the subject of global warming. But every time snow breaks out in England, all the people that don't believe in anthropogenic global warming link to Charles's item in 2000 - "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past". As an Independent article it was a perfect example of its kind - of the highest Green potentials, scare-mongering in an intellectual kind of way and ahead of its time. At least 12 years ahead of its time as it turns out. Although, of course, he could turn out to be right in the end.

And so once again, as on many similar days over the last few years, we remember Charles Onians. And all across England, others will do likewise. I suppose you could call it his "Michael Fish" moment. We will celebrate by singing Marillion's 1989 song, Season's End. Makes me melancholy to think it's nearly a quarter of a century since they made this terrifying prophecy.


Getting close to Season's End, I heard somebody say
That it might never snow again in England.
Snowflakes in a newborn's fist, sledging on the hill
Are these things we'll never see, in England?

(Answer - No).

Quadrantids

So a disappointing evening.

We've been outside for an hour, taking part in this evening's "Wonders of the Shooting Stars" viewing of the Quadrantids. I was looking forward to the excitement of knowing that these little pieces of rock and dust, shed by an asteroid, are illuminating our lives in a brief moment of brilliance - burning out, rather than burning on, just like what we shouldn't. If you can't rend spiritual truth out of that concept, you've got no soul. And knowing that Venus and Jupiter are also well visible at the moment just added to the excitement of the evening.

I tell you, we've not seen a think with all the cloud. And I've not been this wet since the fight broke out at Filling-Up of Beakers. And cold? I tell you, I'm colder than an impoverished caroller in a Thomas Hardy novel. Same again tomorrow, I guess. Surely we must see some tomorrow.

A Cold, Wet Day

And so the cold rain falls on Husborne Crawley. On the far side of the Abbey wall, a lion shudders and dreams of the savannah. These are the times that try our souls.

Sometimes it's the dry waiting times. In the valley of the shadowless death, they pray for thunderclouds and rain, as the poet sang.

But in the cold, wet waiting times? We can have a kind of romance about April showers, or even a monsoon - though we wouldn't want to stand in one, perhaps. But on a cold gray day, (when a cold gray man may) a day which can't be bothered to snow because that would be effort, you get this foul, saturating rain that you can't dance in, can't sing in - you just want so sit indoors and eat crumpets, drink coffee and shudder. Somewhere out there below the southern horizon, the hordes are teeming out of London Bridge station and looking upwards in horror. Fitzrovia's bright clothing will be dimmed by the drizzle. And the floors of Westminster - disobeying all superstition and Health and Safety - will be covered in opened umbrellas.

Still, the children heading schoolwards will have warmed hearts, as they look towards their holiday. And their joy at a week off before Christmas may warm up the doom in some mothers' hearts.  And cold, miserable rain doesn't just bounce off the ground and dry. It soaks deep, as the Greensand blots it up and stores up the promise of life ahead when the land needs it - not now in the dying time, the darkling time, the hoping time - but in the growing time, the awakening time, the rising .time to come.

Think I'll have another coffee. It's absolutely foul out there.

"Yellow" alert of weather forecasters talking tripe

It's the Weather People's  latest technique for getting in the news.

In the old days they'd issue a forecast based on their computer model of it always being hotter than yesterday, and say we'd have barbecue summers, tropical heatwaves in July, Indian summers and lager winters. But they were always wrong, and deservedly laughed to shame.

So now they have introduced the concept of a "Yellow alert". I'm guessing a yellow weather alert is two down from red, and one up from green. Perhaps with bronze alert and primrose alert available for those tricky not-quite-so-clear alerts.

Far as I can tell, "yellow alert" means that they don't think anything serious is going to happen, but they've not been in the news for a week or two. It has the great advantage that, if nothing happens, they can say "it wasn't a specific warning - just a yellow alert".

Now I reckon that we have three tends that can conveniently come together here. One is that nobody believes the Met Office any more, because they are, by and large, pants. Another is that, despite that first point, everybody has a desperate urge to hear scary weather stories. Aand the third is that the Government wants to save and/or make some money. So I suggest, bringing these three threads together, that the Government sell the Met Office to Sky Sports. The taxpayers make some money, the Met Office can talk even greater tripe - along with Geoff from the Football programmers saying "Lucky for Total Network Solutions they won 2-0 today over Cefn Druids - especially with that plague of frogs forecast" and we all feel like the world is more exciting than in fact it is. Then on the terrestrial channels, as they were once known, we can replace the pointless, fake-excitement-generating weather people with people's nans, who can just appear on the screen wearing headscarfs and pac-a-macs and say "It's September. It might rain" or - as it might be in Husborne Crawley- "Looks black over Leighton".

Just one thought though - when your local weather people issue a "Yellow alert of rain", do you think what I think? Yes, thought so. Ugh.

The return of Spring

And such is the English climate.

We were revelling in the latest set of unprecedentedly warm conditions. In the belief that, even in mid-May, Summer had already set in. Before his latest trip to the United States, Hnaef had celebrated a whole series of barbecues. We haven't yet defined barbecues as religious festivals, but in the triumph they display of faith over evidence and experience, and the wholesale evidence of burnt offerings, we think that we may be on to something.

As I write tonight, the showers are glancing off the conservatory roof. Out across the Great Lawn, a few members of the Hnaefist Order of Beaker Folk are struggling to light a barbecue. That the tray is full to overflowing with rainwater does not seem to stop them. For a short while I considered getting the fires lit tonight - but I have decided to preserve the fuel until we really need a fire, in August

There is no doubt in my mind, as I glance at my mud-encrusted Wellington boots, that Spring is back. We celebrated summer i-cumen in on May 1, and now things are going backwards. It is often the way with the English weather, of course.

I look out of the East side of the conservatory, and I see the stalls that Drayton's people had set up for their Church Fete on Saturday being blown away and down into the brook. And I smile a little. We are in England. And everything is normal.

Thunder

On this happy day, there seems nothing better to talk about than the wrath of God. Or, at least, one of the things that have traditionally been seen as God's wrath manifest.

In days gone by our Anglo-Saxon or Norse ancestors, huddled in Hrothgar's house  or equivalent, would worry themselves silly when thunder and lightning struck. They would think it was Thor or Thunor, according to dialect. As they would put it, Thor - what is he good for? And then duck, lest aforesaid thunder deity should sling his war-hammer at them. Those Norse gods didn't do irony. While the Hebrews didn't waste their time personifying thunder. They just put everything down to God - thunder, lightning, hail, light drizzle and that niggling sea fog. But they were clear it was sent directly by the divine, and assumed that it was a sign he wasn't happy. Which is about the approach some Christians had when York Minster was struck about the time of the enthronement of David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham - remember him? The world was gonna end and everything that year.

Now I know that in fact thunder is caused by people rubbing balloons together, and all that. I know there's a scientific explanation for it all. But it still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And I hope that's a psychosomatic phenomenon. And not a purely physical one caused by a sudden build-up of charge in my immediate vicinity. Put simply, regardless of what my rational mind tells me, when the sun is shining I think God is happy. And when it's hailing I assume God's annoyed. And when there's light rain I see it as God's blessing.

But when the weather suddenly changes, and the skies abruptly darken, and the lightning flashes across the sky and there's even just the one unexpected clap of thunder, I assume God is really mad and head for the cellar. As I say, I know it's stupid. I know that if God were really angry he could also find me in the cellar. But that's the way I am. There's just something so un-impersonal about a good thunderstorm. You really do feel that mad gods are shouting across the sky at each other.

So it was a strange 25 minutes, earlier this afternoon, but it's nice again now. Rationality has now been restored, and I'm back in the daylight and enjoying the party again. But I've said it once, and I'll say it again. He's awful scary, is God.

You'll be mist

As fog blankets the Midlands, even unto Nottingham and beyond, I ponder why the old stone circles went out of use.

There are many theories as to why civilisations change. When we had an Empire, it was all about invasion hypothesis - that each race (Beaker People, Celts, Romans, Angles, Vikings) was superseded by the next, better-equipped, conquering people. But in this allegedly gentler age, that has been in its turn superseded by the idea that the people basically stayed where they were, and technologies and habits were acquired by communication and copying rather than conquest - a kind of Iron-Age liberal interventionism, if you will.
But for myself, I reckon that what really tended to happen  was that the menfolk would invade, kill or enslave the pre-existing menfolk, and take the women along with the farms and other possessions. It's not nice, but it seems to fit in with our human condition. And  male behaviour.

But back to the Stone Circles. I reckon it wasn't that a new Celtic belief system that came in, removing the stone circles in a kind of Cornish iconoclasm. Nor that the Celts wiped out the Beaker People. I reckon it was simple. Stone circles have solar alignments - you get together at midsummer or midwinter and watch the sun rise. But imagine if every solstice was overcast or foggy. The "druids" and neo-pagans look miserable enough on our tellies when they get just one. After a century or two of the disappointment of no-shows from the sun, you'd go off and worship in some druidic groves and leave the stones to the bat and the hoopoe. "Coming to the Solstice, Myfanwy?" "Nah, Eileen - I reckon I'll go off to them groves and learn to be Welsh."

Only in Britain

Whenever the weather's a little snowy we always hear that complaint. "Every year it catches us by surprise. Only in Britain".

Well, I've come to the conclusion that's not true. For starters there's the case of poor Hnaef. 48 hours stuck in Munich airport, so long he had to buy in emergency pairs of underpants. Although, from his description of the items, I think he may have gone mad from snow-blindness and bought himself lederhosen instead. And elsewhere even the hyper-efficient Germans have had to stop running trains. Although I don't know whether that's because of the snow, or because they've stopped burning Euros to power them.

And then we have the Belgians. 400 miles of traffic jams. Is it only me that thinks they don't have that much road even in the summer? It's probably some con to get an EU grant for more grit. And 10,000 buses stranded in Normandy and Brittany. Not that there will be any fewer passengers, I dare say the drivers merely sneer as they go past at the best of times. And they run their buses on dodgy Calvados, which they get EU grants for. Which we pay for. Out of the tax that the ConDem government levies on road salt and anti-freeze.  And what about those Qataris? Six inches of snow and I reckon they'd grind to a standstill. Never prepared for snow, the Qataris.

This has been brought to you by "Abroad is bloody and foreigners are fiends". A subsidiary of the English media's reaction to its World Cup disappointment.

A Barbecue Summer and a Mild Winter

Any Beaker Folk heading off to work in the next couple of hours, as they scrape off ice and then slide their way to work, please consider the following:

• Be glad it's such a mild winter, as the Met Office predicted.
• Perhaps if you get snowed in somewhere, you could consider having a barbecue?  I'm sure the Met Office would approve.
• Consider that the mild winter was said by the Met Office to be an evens chance.  The Barbecue Summer, 80% likely.  So they've managed to hit the 1 in 10 chance of being wrong on both.  Impressive by any standards.
• Don't trust anyone from the Met Office to tell you the time, even if you're in a clock-shop.
• Likewise if they offer to organise you a party, even if you're in a brewery.
• Consider that the future funding of the Met Office depends upon them trying to persuade Government that more meteorologists are a good idea.  Consider that tax accountants never say we need less regulation, computer project managers never think less computer systems are wrong.  And scientists need grants.  And if their long-term forecast is "about normal.  Bit snowy, bit mild, bit cold, some rain" then no-one's gonna give them grants.  What we need are exciting forecasts, for meteorologists to be environmental catastrophe merchants.

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On the subject of science, I'm now less happy.  Yes, colliding an apple moving at near-light-speed with a Higgs Boson was very dramatic last night.  But we forgot to keep an eye on the Black Hole we produced.  During the night St Bogwulf's chapel disappeared into the void.  My Granddad would have approved.  While we continue to work on the new fireproof Moot House (construction work cancelled due to snow and ice for its 4th crazy week!) I guess we're back in the Dining Room.

Weather Warning

As we move from Equinox towards Solstice, the warnings of the season's first gales are upon us.  A shame, as the planned tea-light float is probably off.  And Hnaef's latest attempt to tight-rope walk over the Orchard.  And the balloon flight.  And the outdoor badminton tournament.  And the "who can stand on the Trilithon the longest" competition that Young Keith's organised.  Although I always had my doubts about that one.  I just don't think pelting the person on the Trilithon with wet sponges to knock them off showed true reverence for a holy artefact.

Yet it left me pondering on - on what?  A dichotomy?  A paradox?  An ambiguity?  Or something else indicating a sense of one thing, and yet a slightly different thing.  The way that the gentle trickle of a stream can  rise to something that floods a town the size of Waterbeach (although let's be honest, if you move to Waterbeach without wondering why it's got that name you're not really Mrs Lateral Thinker, are you).  The way that the flames that gently warm the hearts of beast and Beaker Person, can burn the Moot House down.  The way that a gentle breeze can cool and refresh, yet a howling gale can bring a chimney down on your conservatory.  And the way that a dove's gentle cooing brings comfort, nostalgia and gladness to the human soul.  Yet park your car under a tree and your windscreen suffers.

Truly the spirit moves as it wills, and we are in turns heartened and left to run screaming for cover.  I feel the need for a lime tisane.