weather – Page 41 – don't confuse the narrator

‘when daffodils begin to peer’

In fact, of course, the daffodils in the garden were ‘beginning to peer’ a month ago, but the ones in the photo are a far more local species.

From looking around the web, I think I’ve identified them as narcissus pallidulus.

What isn’t clear from the photo is just how tiny they are.

The fact that they are as pale as their name suggests, and that the petals tend to curl right back rather than standing out, star-like, around the ‘trumpet’ – which is probably no bigger than a single lily-of-the-valley bell – means it’s quite easy to miss them altogether, although they are now about in their thousands in the pine woods along the river bank.

pruning, ploughing and punning

For the last week, the skies have been almost solid grey and the drizzle has only been interrupted by intermittend torrential rain and the occasional thunder storm. This has all come while the plum trees have been in full bloom, so I imagine we may not get much fruit this year as there have been few insects around to pollinate.
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dewi sant

I’ve been keeping an eye on the daffs outside my window for the last month and wondering if they’d make it out in time.

In the end, despite showing colour for a week now, they haven’t. Perhaps later on today, if the sun keeps shining, they will unfurl their yellow flounces in celebration of St David’s day.

Mind you, they aren’t real daffs, anyway, as they are multi-petalled, double flowers, not the clear bright-trumpeted kind that line the road down to South Wales.

(For information about the wild daffodils of Britain, check out the I Hate Daffodils! website.)
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hazy thoughts

Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
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fur tree

lichens on oak tree trunk — I'm lichen it

“The times they are a-changing.” Or, at least, the weather is. And in Spanish, of course, tiempo is the word for both time and weather. (More about that in the ‘having a good time’ post.)

Yesterday, I sat outside sun-bathing and watched the very first swallows of the season sitting on the phone wires apparently tidying themselves up after their long journey.

Today the wind is howling, and the sight of the the billowing tree tops through the window is enough to make any one feel sea-sick. Perhaps the oak tree in the photo will be pleased to be wrapped up warm in its furry green coat.