As some of you know, I edit a monthly online alpine newsletter. Here is my latest introduction, that I thought might raise a smile. Ironically, the sun has since come out in Pembrokeshire.
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According to the Met Office this apparently miserable summer is not so bad after all. It would seem our lack of sunshine is merely on the drearier side of dull and well within the statistical norms for an Atlantic archipelago that sits astride the jet stream. The problem, they say, is not so much the indigo skies as our rose-tinted memories of years gone by.
If that analysis seems awry, you’ll not be alone in your thinking. For it seems we’ve evolved to recall most keenly those events that are ‘exceptional or good’. In the case of the weather, we tend to evoke – and romanticise —the heatwave summers of our youth more than we do those holidays on a windy beach. Reality, the Met Office claims, is more prosaic than our fallible memories would lead us to believe.
I was pondering this after Jane and I spent a week in the Lake District earlier this month. Most days were grizzly at best, and yet we togged up and walked round Derwentwater and through Langdale and sat in the caff with dripping cagoules and a soggy map… actually, it was a waterlogged phone, but you get the picture.
And you know what: we had a lovely time!
So much so, that it made me wonder, if us mountain lovers have developed some sort of evolutionary advantage? We might most vividly recall our sunniest summits or perfect paths – but it isn’t going to stop us making the most of the more mundane. Indeed, here in the UK, we’d have pretty paltry tick lists if we only ventured out in the best of conditions.
None of which is to suggest we should dismiss the meteorologists. Rather, that in summers like these, we do well to remember the wisdom of perhaps our two greatest forecasters…
What was it they used to sing?
Bring me sunshine
In your smile…
Now, that really does bring back memories.
It seems we remember the best and the worst most vividly. My husband and I were talking about this the other day. When we were kids we don't remember having heatwaves like we do now. I remember hot days but they were always followed by thunderstorms or hail storms. And the truth is, who knows? I do know that we have more days over 30C than we ever did before, that's a fact, and we are in the midst of a drought, also a fact. We also don't remember fires like we have now, or summer days turned hazy with smoke. Probably we grew up in a time that happened to not have a lot of fires, the natural cycle of fires. But we are also living in a time of climate change and I wonder how accurate any of my memories of weather were when I was a child.
ReplyDeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteMemory is one of the most unreliable tools the human has for recording things! But why let scientific records spoil a good moment of nostalgia?! Meanwhile, I site on the Moray coast watching a reddening sun float into the horizon and marvel at what has been, for Scotland, a suprisingly decent spell of weather! YAM xx
In my childhood, my parents took us on vacation the same two plus weeks every year, over the Labor Day holiday, before school started. Sometimes the weather was outstanding; once it rained all but two days. Then we went back to school and invariably the weather was blistering hot, when there was all the canning at home, after school. As my dad used to say, "Weather, whether or not." We just carried on.
ReplyDeleteA quarter of a century of living in Scotland has taught me the same - if you only venture out when perfect weather conditions are forecast, you'll soon develop cabin fever!
ReplyDeleteAnd one always feels sunnier when remembering Morecambe and Wise.
Cheers! Gail.