The French are very little different from the English with the weather a main topic of conversation. The French may have an edge on health taking precedence. Dr Johnson, a gentleman whose views and sourness of temper I share, said, in the 18th Century: ‘When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather’. For many years I had a monthly page in various magazines to do with horticulture. One editor suggested that I write out a ‘Menu’ for the weather we would like.

I wrote a year’s menu, specifically for market gardeners. Then ‘A la Carte’. Benjamin Franklin said : ‘Some are weatherwise, some are otherwise’. I would order no rain at all on a Sunday morning in our ‘Season’ (May to end October) - it is hard enough to get people to work on a fine Sunday, bunching onions in two feet of mud and a downpour leads to absenteeism. Rain on Friday nights, so we do not have to irrigate on Saturdays. It can rain on Saturday too if it likes. As we do not like cricket and have no wish to go to the local fete we can put our feet up, secure in not having to check the irrigation machines or move pipes.

No hailstorms, ever. Wet days only when I am in a meeting in London or in the South of France. We could order enough snow to keep producers North of Hertfordshire from sending but not enough to stop us cornering the market.

Mary Wednesday said her husband did not like walking in the rain. They had a walking holiday and were drenched for most of it. I posted that my mother would not go out if it was too hot, too cold, wet or windy, so she did not go out at all. So my father traded her in for a weatherproof model.

If you had perfect weather dished out to order it would make those nice weather forecasters redundant. Their wives would have to make patchwork quilts with all the stick-on clouds, sunshine and snowflakes. The Americans have already gone far ahead in weather remarks: They just plonk a Dank and nasty or Dry and dandy on their stick-on charts. Better to quote from the poets.

Take Shaw. Instead of the satellite weather map which I cannot understand we could get: West wind, wanton wind, wilful wind, womanish wind, false wind from over the water, will you never blow again?’ That’s telling it. Swift was simpler: ‘A coming shower your shooting corns presage’. Coleridge: ‘Summer has set in with its usual severity’. No more. High pollen counts and sun block. Byron: ‘The English winter, ending in July, to recommence again in August’. No wonder he was always in Italy. Tennyson, pessimist: ‘I dreamed there would be Spring no more, that Nature’s ancient power was lost’. Personally, I think nature makes a fare hash of things, seemingly having lost the instruction sheet for changing the seasons. Do you go out armed with a brolly and a cardy ‘in case’? 

The Gardener

A Moodscope member