Love Sunshine

Il Penseroso 2

I'm resolved to pursue this rather morose line of reasoning at least until the weather improves. To lose one summer is unfortunate, to lose two starts to look like carelessness. I'd gladly swap some of Britain's golden Olympic medals for a few record-beating golden days. Just a few. But I'm supposed to be ruminating from my dark mossy cell on our dreary weather, our predilection for melancholy and the belief that there is some kind of creative intercourse between them. I use the term precisely.

Anthony Woodward and Robert Penn rather like our weather. They both live in Wales, so they've had plenty of practice. I saw them give a very amusing talk on their book The Wrong Kind of Snow a few weeks back, where they reiterated the point made in their introduction that rain has been very good for Britain. So much rain means green green grass. The green green grass fed nice fat sheep to make jolly nice wool, and jolly nice wool made Britain, as they put it, 'a great trading nation. The wealth from wool - damp weather converted for export - gave us the most advanced economy in the world, bankrolling the Industrial Revolution, and helping create the largest empire of modern times'. They also point out that the invention of most ball games from lawn tennis to football occurred in these green isles because the grass was so good we had to invent amusing things to do on it. None of this particularly stirs me into any kind of patriotic fervour or allows me to embrace the persistent showers as so many pennies from heaven. We may have invented or excelled at these things once, but even I (who have zero interest in sport) know the pantomime pony of our glory days of sporting triumph has well and truly bolted. But we still have the rain, o yes, raining every day on the lush green sward without an industrial revolution or a sporting one to convert it into anything but misery and despair. I'm not managing this idea very well, am I?

Ok, the industrial revolution created wealth; but it also created great plumes of smoke and smog, blotting out the sun to the extent that in the City of Westminster in December 1890 there were recorded zero hours of sunlight. A vicious circle. Rain fuels industrial innovation, industry creates more beastly stuff to blot out the sun. Joyous. And what of now? Whatever happened to the idea that global warming might be coming our way in the form of a 'Mediterranean climate?'. The latest is what we will get as our Nemisis for industrial pre-eminence is 'climate change', ie. much much more of the same. More disgraceful summers like the last two. Well I hope the bleeding sheep are happy.

Can I discern any silver linings from these historico-climatic speculations? Well, I suppose fog and smog do at least have a rather romantic and nostalgic tinge to them, and did actually, to be fair, inspire wondrous art. Would Dickens's Bleak House be quite such a powerful novel without that extraordinary description of foggy London in the opening chapter? Or would Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the Penguin Classics edition of which I can heartily recommend), have gripped our imaginations so tightly had the the 'chocolate coloured pall' of fog not cloaked his tale in sepulchral eeriness? Or Whistler and Monet have painted such melting masterpieces of atmospheric effect had we not made smog one of our most important aesthetic hallmarks? TBC...

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