Mad March Weather

Sunshine & Showers, March 2014

April may be the cruellest month, at least according to T.S. Eliot, but weather-wise, March is usually the maddest month. Anything can happen anywhere on these islands in March, often all at the same time: there might be snow down south in Hampshire while up north the Hebrides bask in "unseasonal" sunshine. But there is nothing predictably seasonal about early spring in Britain: expect the unexpected. It can be very hard deciding what to wear, when the temperature veers wildly from day to day, and a sunny morning can transform into an afternoon of heavy rain. "Sunshine and showers" is the usual forecaster's springtime shrug of resignation.

It's all to do with the titanic push-and-shove between different planet-scale air-masses as the Equinox approaches. Stuck out here in an exposed position on the main North Atlantic battle-front we generally get a bit of everything going, reducing the weather forecasters to incomprehensible gabble and much arm-waving, as they try to fit a complex national picture into their allotted two minutes. When I was studying A-level Geography one of our teachers, Les Ransley, was a maestro at creating elaborate meteorological diagrams on the blackboard with coloured chalks. His signature move was a large "W" fronting a fat arrow coming in from the Atlantic containing three lines of text: "arm", "et", and "esterlies". Clearly, the source of an air current has a major influence on the weather: just the other day we had a "plume" of Saharan dust that came all the way up from Africa and turned the ski-slopes of Europe salmon pink, as well as leaving an orange-red deposit of dust over the parked cars and pavements of the south-east of England.

I really enjoyed studying Geography to "advanced" level. For much of my childhood I had wanted to be a naturalist, until it gradually dawned on me that I was really a collector, and would never make it as an actual scientist. It was clear that I didn't get any science which didn't involve using coloured pencils to draw things. I'm sure you have heard the cliché, "I must have been away from school the day X was explained." Well, cliché or not, I'm pretty sure I was off sick the day they explained the point of Chemistry, for example, at least as taught in my school (and assuming the point wasn't to try and covertly fill another boy's blazer pocket with distilled water from a lab-bench squeeze bottle). Above all, I found that I lack the crucial component in the human brain that enables mathematics to take place there. But there was one sort-of science in which an ability with coloured pencils was an asset, and that was Geography.

March 2018

March 2021

One of the themes that has sustained this blog is "paths not taken", and this is another one: in an alternative life, I might easily have become a geographer. Even at "advanced" level, entire lessons could be taken up happily copying Les Ransley's coloured chalk drawings from the blackboard: graphics that explained climate patterns, mountain formation, or population distribution in a digestible and memorable package. We often used to play a game, Hunt the Climate, which involved identifying a location from its typical annual climate data: rainfall, temperature, and so on. Once you had a grasp of the basic patterns it was surprising how accurately you could land on a spot. Seasonal climate, with summer in June-August? Northern Hemisphere, north of the tropics. Summer drought? "Mediterranean" climate. Temperature range moderate? Probably Europe, but, hmm, oddly cool in summer... Cold maritime current off a west coast? Sir! Sir! It's Northern California! We also got a basic introduction to statistics – mean vs. median, random distribution, etc. – and it was the nearest I ever came to exercising pure reason until, much later in life, I discovered an unsuspected facility for programming.

Even better, there were field trips into the landscape, where terminal moraines and hanging valleys could be rambled over, fossils collected, and the strike and dip of strata pondered. There is no question that those two years studying geography enhanced my later life just as much as studying literature or languages. I think there are few greater pleasures than being out in a striking landscape on a bright cold day either side of Easter, properly dressed and in good company, with a pub meal in prospect or even just a flask of tea and a fat sausage roll in your backpack. Perhaps on such a walk you might even come across a freshly dug quarry yielding museum-quality fossils to stuff in your pockets, like the one we found in mid-Wales a couple of years ago. Once a collector, always a collector.

Or you might be lucky enough to see something remarkable, some perfect alignment of landscape and light, and take the time and trouble to photograph it, hoping as always that what you have captured will not be just a pale reflection of what you saw, but a transmutation of it into something richer and stranger, a picture that might convey something of the depth of what you felt about being there to others; the magical reverse of a pretty pebble collected on the beach that turns into just another dull stone as it dries in your pocket.

Tracy & Debbie surprised by The Angel of the North