What I love about weather lore is that our ancestors were so good at contradicting themselves, as long as they could make it rhyme. Thus, the famous saying “March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb” is sometimes reversed, so that “March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion”.
Apart from the fact that the former version is, to my mind, more euphonious, which of the two is more accurate? As is often the case with our weather, that depends. The meteorological historian Philip Eden noted that although on occasion March starts windy and ends sunny, or the other way around, in most years neither phenomenon occurs. Given that – like October – March is a month “on the cusp” between two seasons, in this case winter and spring, then it’s hardly surprising that the weather can be so variable.
In recent years, we have seen spring coming earlier and earlier, so that perhaps March will eventually lose its position to February as the month of transformation. But for now, at least, it is sufficiently unpredictable to allow both versions of the old saying.
