Bye Bye Summer

As I flick the switch and hear the central heating boiler splutter into reluctant life I can hide from the fact no longer – summer is over. Thinking it was premature, I ignored the Guardian’s gloomy headline on the 18th August which forecast two weeks of wet, windy and cold weather that would ‘signal the end of summer’. But I cannot ignore the plummeting mercury any longer.

Meteorological Summer

This seems like a good time to look back over summer 2014, after all the ‘meteorological summer’ (did you even know there was such a thing?) June, July and August is over and the statistics are ready to be pored over.

Let me take you back to April 9th when, with a sneer, I read the Daily Express article which predicted a ‘scorcher’ and that we would ‘roast in a three month heatwave’ that would smash ‘ALL’ UK weather records. By July, I was preparing to repent of my cynicism and congratulate the good old weathermen and women as I watched happy locals and holiday makers soaking up the sun on the beautiful Northumberland beaches and playing in the usually steel grey and forbidding, but now blue and welcoming, North Sea …not a wind-break or wetsuit in sight. The good old Jet Stream was sitting to the north of the UK giving us warmth and sunshine and leaving the poor folk of Iceland and northern Scandinavia with our usual wind and rain.

But just as we were getting used to leaving the house without waterproof and umbrella ‘just in case’ August brought business as usual and 42% above average rainfall.

Woken by the Sun or…

Now it’s September; the nights are drawing in and the ritual of turning back the clocks will soon be upon us. You have probably put away the summer wardrobe, put the lid on the sandpit and pulled the plug in the paddling pool. You might be thinking you can take down the blackout blinds and BlindSides™. You feel safe in the knowledge that you won’t be woken by the sun at 5.30 and you won’t have the 7.30 bedtime battle with children who don’t understand why they are being shooed into cots and beds when it’s ‘still day-time’! But, hold your horses and take a look outside…streetlamps, all 5.6 million of them in the UK alone. Better stick to blackouts and BlindSides™ if you still want your eight hours.