"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky." - Rabindranath Tagore
One
of the essentials that I make it a point to put into my handbag every time I
leave the house is my obnoxious lime green umbrella – we’ve all heard of the
dismal, dreary British weather. Part of me had assumed that maybe it’s an
exaggerated myth and perhaps it would not be raining all the time after all.
And surely enough it doesn’t rain ALL the time, but it is safe to expect showers
at least for a while at some point during the day, and definitely on the
sunniest of days when you would least expect it to. I’ve never experienced
weather that’s more unpredictable, more unsure of itself than in England. Only
this Friday, it was pouring as I walked into my 9am lecture, and looking
through the classroom window after just a few minutes I watched the rain cease
and observed snowflakes starting to drift around. My professor pulled down the
shutters and I didn’t see anymore, but when I stepped out of the building an
hour and a half later, I was blinded by dazzling sunlight and there was no sign
of the rain or snow that had occurred only a couple of hours ago.
The following is a famous excerpt from
Bleak House by Charles Dickens that expresses in a fine manner the typical weather
in dreary Britain. To be fair, there are days when the sun is high up and
everything is absolutely gorgeous, but that’s a different story…
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the
river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where
it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a
great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards,
and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes
and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their
wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,
down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his
shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping
over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they
were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” ― Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” ― Charles Dickens, Bleak House
I did not take this picture myself, but this pretty much explains it
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