Ode to Joy
Friday, 11 April
To borrow again from my old friend Mr Eliot: April is the driest month. Hot too.
Okay, I admit to some poetic licence in the above statements. April is obviously not, in absolute terms, the driest or the warmest month. But according to la Chaîne Météo, rainfall in France has declined in the first full month of spring by 14% over the last 20 years. Over the last decade, temperatures have also risen more than in any of the other 11 months (+0.61°C/1.2F, versus an average of +0.4C/0.7°F), with some recent Aprils being 3°C/5.5°F above the former normal.
In meteorological terms, the unseasonably nice weather is due to a disturbed gulf stream creating anticyclones, high pressure zones attracting hotter, drier, subtropical air from the south, which once they have settled in, have trouble going home (which I can understand; northern Europe is a lovely place to live).
I looked this up because for a long time I have sensed but had no proof that April isn’t what she used to be. That she has not been fulfilling her role as provider of the showers that bring May flowers, a calling that long pre-dated TS Eliot’s cruelest month of dull roots being stirred by spring rain or even Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth century Canterbury Tales which begins with “Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote,/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote" (Eliot in his post-World War I poem was of course alluding to the earlier, more upbeat, work).
My hunch has also been substantiated by a new-ish feature on the iPhone weather app that informs you of the day's temperature relative to the "average". Mr Apple is much more alarmist than Monsieur Duchesne of Chaîne Météo and regularly claims many additional degrees (today, for example, +8°C/14.4°F!). The phone also informs me about precipitation, and in the last weeks, it has rained 45mm/1.8 inches less than "usual", a 75% deficit.
But after months (and months) of grey and wet, it is hard for even a drought-o-phobe like me to begrudge this dry April. I'd almost forgotten that the sun can be a natural mood enhancer.
Which one needs these days, especially when one cannot stop one's self, between an hour of work and the morning walk, from peeking at the horror show of world news.
Sunny mornings and nature this last week in the Perche have worked on me like an anti-depressant injected directly into my veins. Starting at the pond, where a duck couple is nesting...
...and carrying on alongside the field of formerly May flowering rapeseed...
Since I am no longer slip-sloshing through the mud but pit-patting on dry clay soil hard as an uneven terracotta floor...
...I don't have to watch my step so carefully, can observe spring's visible daily progress...
...all the way around and back through the orchard where cherry and plum are in bloom and the apples not far behind...
But it's been the birds singing their hearts out that really lifts my spirits. The thrushes, robins, blackbirds, wrens, chiffchaffs and greenfinch that are blissfully unaware of tariffs and markets and democracy dissolving in the hands of a vengeful old man and his ovine acolytes. I can't usually see the small creatures, but the sound of their song is joy in its purest form.
Still, if the weather keeps up like this for too many more years (and climate change makes that almost a given), we may have to adjust our adages and add footnotes to our verse about how things used to be. March showers bring April flowers? Not much poetry in that, but such is our age.