Gratitude: Day Three.

Today, I am grateful for the weather.

The British famously talk about the weather. Even though I know this is the most terrible cliché of Britishness, like queuing, saying sorry, and enjoying a nice cup of tea, I still do it. I do it at the garage and in the post office and in the shop. Everyone in the village does it. Quite often, they will refer to some mysterious authority. 

‘They say snow is coming in.’ 

‘They say it’s going to get bitter next week.’ 

‘They say that February will be bad.’

The ‘they’ is never specified. I often imagine it is some old farmer, a sort of ancient mariner type, who can simply look up at the sky and sniff the wind and know whether it will be sleet or gales.

We also talk a lot in my neighbourhood about our own curious little micro-climate. Our weather forecasts are often dramatically wrong. We regularly have the highest or lowest, wettest or driest. (This actually is probably confirmation bias. I don’t notice when Kidderminster or Ashby-de-la-Zouch is the hottest or wettest, but I feel oddly proud and pay close attention when my village gets the prize.) Famously, when it is pouring with rain down the valley in Aberdeen, or when the entire seafront is blanketed in haar, the sun shines brightly on our little village. 

The great irony is that the British always talk about the weather but we don’t really have weather. We don’t have three year droughts or tornado seasons. We don’t have dust storms or ice storms or bitter blizzards which last for days. We tend to grumble if the mercury tips over thirty degrees in the height of summer, and if a little snow falls on London, half the public transport grinds to a halt. 

And the reason I am grateful for that today is that the plight of Australia is at the forefront of the national consciousness. A whole country is burning, and it’s almost beyond imagination. I read stories about people sheltering on the beach with their horses and dogs, of a man who went to help a neighbour save his house, only to come back to find his own burnt to the ground, of city-dwellers unable to breathe. I’ve talked to Australians who are in mourning for a whole nation, who fear their beloved land will never be the same again. My heart aches and breaks for them.

And even as I remind myself to be grateful, I go down to the horses and hear myself say, ‘Oh, this wind is bitter.’ A little bit of bitter wind! That is the worst of my weather problems. 

But there was no rain or sleet or snow, so my posse of young horsewomen and I took the mares up the hill. The sky was clear and singing with colour and the hills were indigo in the afternoon light. It’s the funeral today of a dear friend, five hundred miles away in the south. I could not go, so I cantered my red mare up to the top of the hill and I said my own goodbye. These hills are my cathedral, and I’ve committed many spirits to them, when I could not go to the formal service. I did it for my godfather, and a young cousin who died in a pointless accident, and an old cousin who went full of years. I did it for my mum, who refused to have a funeral, so I gave her one of my own. I rode the mare and sang a song and recited some Yeats. It was one of the greatest funerals I ever went to.

And on all of those days, on all of those sad farewells, the weather was kind. The sun shone and the mountains were bright with majesty. There was peace and stillness, so the souls could fly to the heights.

So my gratitude today is to this dear old temperate climate, which never throws too much at us. It’s easy to forget how lucky you are until you see what other people have to face. I’ve never been to Australia, but my heart is there today.