42: What’s the point of …. Winter
It is winter here in the (not so United) Kingdom. (I’ll leave my discourse on Nicola Sturgeon for another post.) This means it is cold all the time, wet most of the time, windy a lot of the time and occasionally foggy.
Does it need to be like this? Why do we have these things called seasons .... and why does the UK have so many of them?
We seem to have several seasons each week ... although more properly it is just several forms of winter. When we do occasionally have a summer, usually on either June 14 th or August 3rd, the weather is also what the weather forecasters refer to as ‘changeable’. It differs from winter because the rain is a bit warmer.
So, what is the point? Some parts of the world have the same weather almost year-round. They don’t seem to suffer from this. They have profitable tourism sectors. They have predictable and consistent weather which means they can plan ahead.
In the UK, we can say, “Let’s have a barbecue tonight” but we can’t, with any confidence, say, “Let’s have a barbecue next Friday”.
Of course, there are some advantages to winter. I enjoyed the white stuff that lay on the ground this yesterday - it reminded me of being on the beach in Northumberland - only colder. I tried a bit of frolicking but I think that’s really for puppies like Mavis and Coco, not for a ‘Gand Dame’ like me. I’m not even sure that snow compensates for the cold and the wet of winter.
Some humans seem to like snow. They romp and play; they run (and sometimes fall); build strange humanoid figures; throw lumps of it and generally behave like young puppies. Juveniles!
The world spent billions on putting men on the moon; science has just produced a vaccine for COVID-19 in record time ... why couldn’t those funds have gone into weather control.
The best that human beans could do was to invent the macintosh and the umbrella. (The mac(intosh) keeps you dry; the umbrella keeps your mac dry. Genius??)
If only they would switch their priority.... then we could perhaps cancel winter altogether.