I have left what I think is an appropriate gap between this and my last weather post. That was back in August. I was going to say, when things were different.
But that would not be true. Here, tucked between the gulf stream and a great hulking continental mass, rain is never far away. It’s not even colder. It’s just the same.
Felix’s school topic is The Weather. Last time he came home with a challenging piece of homework: to make a poster showing all the different cloud types.
Erk.
We surfed the net, picked up one that already existed, and Felix used that as a model. I wondered, just now, if what he learned had lodged in his usually quick little brain.
“Felix, you know that poster you did last week- can you remember the different kinds of clouds?”
He looked very positive indeed. How male.
“Stratus…..” he launched in….”cumulus and….” this was sounding extremely promising. Maybe I do, indeed, have a genius for a son.
He finished triumphantly: “Culumus and Columbus!”
To quote Marge Simpson, of the towering blue hair: I don’t even know where to begin to tell you what’s wrong with that one.
But that was last week. This week scales new heights of educational sophistication. It will equip our children to face this brave new world, which is so fast-fuelled with every kind of media and information.
He has been asked to watch a weather forecast, note its conventions, and then write one himself.
When in doubt, I always say in a cut-glass accent- think Brief Encounter- always watch the BBC.
Their online service has a weather summary on demand. And do you know, I have never appreciated before how beautifully written it is.
It is a lovely lady in a maroon tailored suit called Helen Willetts today. I wonder if she writes the script? She talks about chilly starts, cloud which sweeps inland, grey scenarios and how the west is the best. The sun nibbles at the cloud and mist is blocked by the Penines and there are dense patches of fog. Beautifuly put.
Felix watched once and was inspired. I know, Mummy, he suggested with the air of an Oxford professor, why don’t I go and get some paper and we can take notes?
We watched again and marvelled at how the BBC can make weather sound seductive, even if, really, it is just cloudy, cold and wet.
It is always said that weather is often used by British writers to emphasise the plight of their characters.
I wonder, though, if it is so much in our bones, this rain, this climate, that it shapes the very assumptions we make.
I always think of those tempestutous Bronte sisters at a time like this.
The West Riding of Yorkshire can be a bleak backdrop. It can be cold and inhospitable. It can also be rugged and rough and beautiful.
The novels of the sisters are filled with untamed landscapes and weather which reflects how their troubled, Byronian characters are.
Heathcliff is the ultimate wild, raw man. I never understood him. I think somehow Emily Bronte, for all she was the daughter of an Irish clergyman, knew more about humanity than most of her gender.
It is said she was so caught up with the Yorkshire landscape and its wild weather, that she would pine and grow ill if she was taken away from it. She needed the moors just as much as the trees and rocks which made that landscape their home.
The scene when Heathcliff is found, dead, at Wuthering Heights is so final in this most base and earthen, but exalted, of plots. Bronte does not choose snow, or sun, or even a storm for its backdrop.
Instead he is discovered in driving rain. It has poured all night, and when someone walks round the house they discover the door swinging open. He must be up or out, the observer concludes, because, had he stayed in bed, the showers would have drenched him though and through.
It all comes down, in the end, to the rain and the way it seeps into your bones.
When we lived in Cornwall, there was one great, good stately home which ruled them all, one which bound them. It was called Llanhydrock.
It was green and charming and everything a mansion in the heart of the Cornish countryside should be. It had the right smell, the old-house-smell, extensive gardens with topiary almost too vast for good taste, and the most wonderful walking gallery where one could stroll up and down.
We visited it often, and loved its strangely parochial feel, despite the grand architectural gestures it used.
We used to buy in videos in those far off days, from the garage down the road from our little hamlet. One day we bought a copy of Twelfth Night. It had a veritable cornucopia of stars in it: Imogen Stubbs played Viola with rare merry gallantry, and Helena Bonham Carter made it impossible for me ever to see Olivia in any other way.
As we watched, we realised something in the landscape was strangely familiar: it had been filmed at Llanhydrock.
If you haven’t, try it: it is captivating. It seems to keep real where merchant Ivory loses touch. Maybe it’s their choice of scriptwriter. Yet all the time we know, even as we are watching, that we are dreaming.
It is Ben Kingsley, the Fool, who steals the show with such a very British song, written 400-odd years ago:
When that I was a little tiny boy,
With a heigh, ho, the wind and the rain
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Kate Shrewsday 
Those wretched homework! Princess number 2 had them also. Bit more challenging for us than them I think!
My brain hurts just from analysing the forecast….
Llanhydrock.
Been there, done that!
We went this Summer.
We visited a lot of National Trust properties ad gardens this Summer in Cornwall. So many that I’m having trouble differentiating them in my mind. This helped
http://www.questforghosts.com/haunted-houses/britain/lanhydrock-house.html
Lovely. Lovely.
Thanks Pseu, it is a lovely place. And the photo on your site really sums it up. I’m off to g and have a rummage round the site! Thanks!
(PS Isn’t it supposed to be the child’s homework?)
Yes it is:-) But in partnership with ones parents….my son was truly floundering. Sure he’s picked up some great hints from the BBC…
G.K. Chesterton says all other countries have climate. Britain has weather.
Who in heaven’s name thinks up such fiendish homeworks as that.
They must know it’s for the parents really.
Dad
I don’t think they thought it through in all honesty, Dad:-) But Felix quite enjoyed it once he could see the style he was aiming for.
Hasn’t written anything yet, though.
Oh l remember lee’s homework !!! Fab as usual Kate ….
And look where he is now! All grown up and clever! (Still can’t believe how time flies)
Thanks Jules. Just lovely to have you back.
“Cumulus and Columbus!” A fine end to our celebration of Columbus Day (which is really tomorrow except for government employees and all others enjoying a three-day weekend).
I’m adding Twelfth Night to our Netflix queue. How lovely to live where it raineth every day. Or at least once a week.
Well ,your slightly dryer neck of the woods sounds eminently attractive to me, Kathy. Enjoy Twelfth Night. I must watch it all over again…
We’ve been having some very British weather of late, except it’s warm with the rain. Today is wild and windy, with lots of sunshine – just does not seem right, does it? – rain is on the way.
I loved the Columbus clouds: pressing for change, swift moving clouds?
Indeed:-) I shall be scanning the sky for columbus clouds. And clearly you would be extremely useful to the BBC in their weather scriptwriting, Liz, how inconvenient that you are on the other side of the world. Your weather, though, sounds very Cornish (on the days it is not raining there!).
The homework is very trying and it’s harder and harder to save face and not reveal my ignorance to my child; but we live and learn.
As for the weather, I love your island, I adore your posts about it, but living there would probably send me into the garage with a suitable length of garden hose …
LOL Which is I believe roughly how Heathcliff handled it, although garden hoses would have been very different then. Whenever I read your posts I feel the sun shining through them. Remember the story about the lady opening up her seaside cottage? Tattooed on my consciousness. With blazing colour. I hanker after the sun, but this island is so engrossing I manage to forget the rain occasionally.
To misquote Bridget Jones, I blurry hate homework.
You’ll have to get Tomie de Poala’s book on Clouds. My kids love it- even Ronan who is 7 and trying to be “too old” for things now.
I sometimes think “home work” is suddenly thought of just before the children escape school.
My older ones used to bring home their maths HW when they were in Primary School. One night I was sitting with my then 8yr old dd trying lamentably to help her with her h/w while her brother then aged 10 was awaiting his turn for help with his maths. After watching the motherly-maths-fiasco for a while he sighed heavily and taking his book said, “I’ll ask Dad then will I?”
Oh the shame! (now I buy the lessons on DVD hehehehe)
As for Heathcliffe and Kathy – well sorry but I always just wanted to slap the pair of them with a wet kipper. Wrong of me I know but…arrgh.
I’ll go and have a look for Tomie de Poala’s book in just a mo:-)
Out of the mouths of babes…. DVD lessons sound fab.
And I do know what you mean about those two….I’m torn because I am a great romantic and I have always bought, hook, line and sinker into the whole Byron business. But they are, when all is said and done, very badly behaved indeed.
A photo a day for a month would make a good project….. weather wise.
What a great idea! Especially where we come from! I’m tempted.
here in the desert a longing for something other than blue skies exists.
blue skies everyday.
those bronte girls really knew how to make a dream man. that is if the ultimate wild, raw man is her fancy.
raw man.
ramen.
oh no.
🙂
LOL your ability to think laterally never ceases to amaze me. You are right, and clearly I am a sucker for a Bronte antihero. I settled down with a Rochester.