In England we have this saying about the weather in March and years ago most of us would have recognised it as pretty accurate. But these days the weather is much less predictable it seems. This year March came in like a lamb, turned lion-like, then back to lamb for a short spell before becoming very fiercely lion until the very last day when the lamb reappeared!
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The days in January may be short, and the sun in short supply. In England we’ve had more than our fair share of rain this month, or so it seemed. But there were also some brighter, if colder, days. And at the start of the month even some snow (relatively rare these days).
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Long or short, every year ends with December, which for many of us means the build-up to the Christmas celebrations. And for those who like me live in the Northern Hemisphere, it also means short days, long dark nights and cold weather.
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I am less than keen on November. The weather is rarely pleasant, though we did get a couple of crisp sunny days. I have to admit though that we still had plenty of autumn leaves on many of the trees though most are now bare. And there were even quite a lot of flowers, at least until the first frost bit.
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I am writing this at the end of March and spring seems definitely to have arrived in London. Street trees are in blossom, birds are more active and more vocal, and our garden is awakening. But my ‘story’ starts back in the tail-end of winter, February.
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I remember many a snowy January as a child, including some very bad ones. And well into my adult years snow was a regular occurrence. But in recent years we’ve seen it less and less, although northern England still gets its fair share. This January it probably got more than its fair share, as storms hit the UK, but in London we saw only a dusting of snow first thing one morning, gone almost as soon as it got light.
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There’s a feeling of autumn in the air as we reach the end of August and head into September. And that's even though recently we’ve had some of the loveliest days of our rather patchy summer. Some leaves are beginning to turn, or even drop, and there are berries on many of the street trees in Ealing.
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This year our dreary spring has continued into this, one of my favourite months, with only a few brighter days. We did have one glorious weekend in the middle of the month, with temperatures more like summer than spring. But we also had more grey days and more wet ones.
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I don’t know about you, but logic tells me that there is no more reason to make a resolution to do something better / more / less on the first of January than on any other day of the year. And also that there is no more reason to believe we will succeed in sticking to that resolution then rather than on a different date.
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The relics of Newcastle’s industrial past are being transformed. And nowhere is that more apparent than on the banks of the Ouseburn, a small tributary of the Tyne just east of the city centre. Here there are still plenty of signs of that past, including old warehouses and the remains of glass furnaces. But many of the old buildings have been transformed into cultural venues including galleries and artists’ studios.
