Why is it that in Britain we always seem surprised when the weather goes a bit haywire? We live in a country with one of the most unpredictable and unstable climates in the world, and it’s always been this way.
In fact, we experience the same amount of rain as most other European capitals, it’s just that ours can be spread throughout the year and our “dry spell” is minimal compared to countries further south, so people need to prepared for all eventualities.
The changeable weather has helped to shape our nation’s identity, for example the wind helping us to defeat the Spanish Armada, and some argue that it has influenced our attitudes to life by making us wary of being too certain about outcomes and aware that plans can change.
It might seem like recent weather has been more extreme, but as history shows, our climate has always been unpredictable. In 1683-84 it was so cold that the Thames froze over so solidly that “frost fairs” happened on the ice, with people walking freely about on the frozen river and building shops on the ice.
We complain about the extreme nature of our seasonal changes now as if we forget that in bygone years heavy snow followed by warm summers was commonplace. However, some argue that climate change has added an extra unpredictability – that in previous years trends lasted for years, whereas now we have two extremely snowy early winters followed by a very mild one this winter. When you combine this with the floods and other events, not just in the UK but across the world, it’s easy to panic about what the unpredictability means.
And even if you don’t panic about what it means, it’s easy to be irritated by it. Trains being cancelled, roads blocked, hose-pipe bans….it might make things more exciting for people in catastrophe modelling jobs but for ordinary people it’s just inconvenient, and for tourists it must be a nightmare.
However, it was ever thus. Records tell us that a Roman soldier posted to Hadrian’s Wall received a letter informing him that two pairs of socks were on their way to him from Sattua to help him cope with the cold weather.
