DOES anything feel more capricious than the weather? It’s March — lambs should be gambolling and flowers bursting into life. Instead we face the coldest day of the year. Ugh.
I, for one, blame the sun. It tricks us into thinking the passage of the seasons is like its progress through the heavens: steady, linear, predictable. Each day it grows lighter a little earlier and darker a little later. That’s how we know we’re emerging from winter and heading for glorious spring, right? Wrong.
Instead we must relearn the same painful lesson each year. Though the days grow longer, winter is not gone.
Just look at the ravages enacted on the country by this rogue pocket of Arctic air. The Met Office has issued a yellow alert, while the UK Health Security Agency has issued its own cold weather warning and placed swathes of the country under a “ level three alert”. I like to imagine flashing lights going berserk in hitherto calm offices and meteorological boffins charging about screaming at one other in blind panic.
Well, they — and we — have reason to fear. In some remote Scottish glens it is predicted to hit minus fifteen, while London tomorrow morning will shiver in temperatures akin to minus three.
So how to take solace from both the temperature and the general sense of unfairness? Simple: a touch of schadenfreude. This is where I come in.
I have more reason than most to bemoan this Beastlet from the east. Foolishly, I booked a cycling holiday in England in March. Starting tomorrow.
My friend and I have watched the forecast with despair as the rain has appeared (comparatively) out of nowhere. Already tricky trails will soon become heaving quagmires of claggy mud. The accounts of those who’ve completed this route make for bracing reading. “The short version is that it is quite tough,” wrote one, who then went on to detail at great length his epic seven-day battle, during which his travelling companion deserted him, his bike broke, and he apparently struggled to find food (this route, by the way, takes place mostly within the Home Counties). That was in August.
We should have known, of course — but it’s easy to forget. So as you huddle from the cruel cold, warm yourself with the thought that out there, someone is probably having a worse time: me.
