Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Friday 8 January 2016

Hooptedoodle #207 - Talking about the Weather...

Grey sky, grey rocks, grey water
It's a noble British tradition - if there isn't much time, let's waste what there is talking about the weather. My first wife used to spend a lot of each winter telling everyone she met how cold it was - you can see this was a serious responsibility - they might have failed to notice otherwise.

The thing which is notable about this morning is that it is the first time this year it has not been raining here - by Malaysian standards that would not be very impressive, but we have seen very little in the way of daylight during the past week - the security light on my garage keeps switching on because it thinks it's night time. Also the skylight windows in our roof are turning green with algae, or some form of aquatic plant, anyway. We have been relatively lucky - further north in Aberdeenshire they have been very severely impacted by wind and water - we at least have no flooding.

All this is just an excuse to post a photo I borrowed from our local community Facebook page - this was taken on Monday, when it was, as you see, a bit breezy. This shows a walkway over the rocks next to our harbour (you can see the handrail) - a recommended stroll in Summer, less so now. That's the Firth of Forth out there, people - almost the North Sea. Somewhere through the murk is the Kingdom of Fife.

Someone on the Facebook page commented that it looks good for surfing - there speaks someone who has never been surfing, sure as you're born.

13 comments:

  1. But of course we talk about our weather all the time. It is a constant source of excitement and interest.
    Spare a thought for less fortunate countries where they know from one day to the next what their weather is going to do.
    "Lovely day, Pedro!"
    "Yes, Miguel, just like yesterday, and the day before that, and just like it's going to be tomorrow."
    Boring.

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    1. You're right, of course - a feature of this last week is that the weather has become constant, which is - as you say - boring, but there is another side to this - does it then become interesting to guess how long it will remain the same? Nah - probably not.

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  2. Not flooding ..yet. Thats good news.

    Not sure abour surfing near rocks but there supposedly sane people here (not me) who go surfing in dry suits in -20 degree weather.

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    1. Our local Facebook page gets a lot of wistful comments from former residents who retired and took their money to live in Marbella or the Algarve (where, of course, they are not immigrants - they are ex-pats - it's funny how that works).

      The weather map of the UK for the last week has had a strange circle of winds around - our bit of the circle was, of course, in the North East, and the anticlockwise rotation has our prevailing wind coming from the East, which is suboptimal - straight from Norway (and Siberia).

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  3. What's a bit of rain to the Scots?? You all love it! Still, you'll be pleased to know they've forecast the white stuff for us down sarf next week! The cheek of it???

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    1. Right on the coast here we get little snow - it was icy this morning though - my early morning drive into the village to visit the chiropractor took me past two separate accidents - no-one hurt, but one little Fiat skidded across the road and punched a hole through a stone wall - without the stone wall it is just possible it would have dropped into the sea, so it could have been worse.

      There's been a lot of activity on the roads at night by gritting lorries for a couple of weeks, but unfortunately last night the guys must have had a rest. As the title of the old song goes, "There Is No Gritter Love".

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  4. That sort of surf is a lovely sound provided one is tucked in a nice warm bed close enough to hear it but far enough away not to worry. I would love to retire somewhere near the sea in a northern clime, if I could afford it. Here in central Cannuckistan they use salt on the roads rather than grit. Does wonders to melt the roads, hard on the poor plants.

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    1. Agreed - someone else's weather is always a different deal - on holiday, I love the refreshing sound of rain - when I'm at home I can almost hear it dripping behind that cracked slate, and all sorts of hideous fungus infestations sharpening their claws. A great relief is offered by the knowledge that Brian the Roof Man was here just before Christmas, to clean the roof gutters and check the channels and the slating - he is due to come back in a month or so to do some more serious maintenance, but in the meantime I can be a bit relaxed about about bad weather.

      We have the sound of the sea here all the time - the farm where I live has two beaches - there is one right by our house, and this beach faces North, so it is much more sheltered than the other beach, which faces East and gets the full fury of the North Sea storms, right up from the German Bight - often it is calm and quiet in our garden, apart from the roar of the east-facing beach, about a mile away, which sometimes sounds like an airliner warming up - visitors are often gently alarmed until we explain.

      I think we use "grit" as a euphemism for salt, though in fact "grit" may be any rubbish they can get their hands on. Salt is very bad for cars as well - it eventually knackered my old Land Rover.

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  5. Bloody miserable so far this Winter, roll on Spring :)

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    1. Hi Lee - for us, here, it could certainly have been a lot worse, but the gloom gets me down! - we had about 8 days on the bounce when it never really got to be daylight - I find that heavy going.

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  6. One of the wonderful things about living in a country that is also a whole continent is the sheer variety. Thanks to the wet season (the butt end of the south-Asian monsoon) we can have flooding up north while the southern half is all afire. Somehow rain is never quite right.

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    1. Hi Steve - your weather - its variety and its extremes - probably makes the UK stuff look pretty lightweight. My dad was an expert in the wrong kind of rain. He was a keen gardener, and he used to phone me up every Sunday to bleat on about how the weather was too dry, and his lawn was dying. Then they had an extended wet spell, and he complained that it was the wrong kind of rain. Too complicated for me.

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    2. It seems there is almost no such thing as the right kind of rain. If the rain comes at just the right time to ripen the wheat it probably rotted the stone fruit.
      At least down here we don't get snow or black ice on the roads. I hate driving on ice.

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