Time and the Weather

Funny man Sid James once said, "...There always has been and there's nothing you can do about it." Whether he was talking about the weather or something else I will undoubtedly never know, but if you were to suggest this statement is about the weather then you wouldn't be too far wrong. It has, indeed, always been here and there is, indubitably, nothing we can do about it...

The same could apply to time "...There always has been and there's nothing you can do about it." another thing we endure but have no control over and the two are inexplicably linked - certain times of the year you are largely guaranteed certain types of weather and even with climate change you're not going to get hot sunny days in December nor are you going to get blizzards and hard frosts in July. Time marches on and the four seasons, give or take some weird anomalies, marches alongside. Just, being there. 

A good friend of mine reminded me last week that 2023 wasn't a brilliant year for the weather. To be a little more specific, July and August were crap in Scotland, we had some respite in September, but essentially autumn arrived two months early and nearly twelve months later we're pretty much waiting for summer to return. The thing is, we know that even if we get a glorious September, it's going to be another six months before we actually get a chance of having a summer. 

One thing I've discovered since living here, even if we're actually lower on the map than Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and most of Northumberland, is that summer starts early and is over by the first Wednesday in August. There have been some exceptions, but for the first five full years we lived here May was always fantastic and much better up here than down south. The price we paid for this was that Augusts weren't the sultry dog days of summer they tend to be in the south, usually the wet and the windy outnumbered the warm and the sunny.

So that means while we usually get a similar amount of summer to everywhere else in the south, ours starts a wee bit earlier and ends a whole lot sooner. Except for the last two years, summer has been as rare as rocking horse shit...

Now, with age comes wisdom, or at least you'd hope so, but seeing some of the older people involved in the recent riots or being keyboard warriors on-line you would have to challenge that assumption. The number of older people who are ignorant, intolerant and hate-filled seems greater than it was when I was growing up. Maybe old people didn't express themselves as vocally when I was younger, or maybe I was able to tune them out? The thing is one thing is guaranteed with getting older; time speeds up. Not actually; there is no proof that clocks go faster or that there's only 350 days in the year rather than 364. Time speeds up because we become more familiar with it and maybe for some that familiarity breeds contempt?

If you make the same journey every week, by the time you've done it one hundred times it seems as though it takes no time at all, whereas those first few journeys felt long, tedious and like they were never going to end. I first noticed this when I was driving to London every day; I would get to the Luton Airport turn and think, 'I've got here quicker than usual' except I was still going at 70mph and it was still taking me x number of minutes, I was just used to the journey and therefore the time it took was more familiar to me. If it took an hour when I started, it still took an hour when I stopped. I just felt like it took less time - that hour was familiar to me, therefore it didn't seem as long.

If you are four years of age, a year is a quarter of your life. If you are 60 years old, a year is a 60th of your life. Can you see how familiarity with time makes it seem to go much quicker. Most 10 year olds view the school holidays as a chasm of time. Do you remember cramming four or five things into a day? Now you're lucky if you can do one thing. Yes, the older you get the more responsibility you have, but I guarantee you if you took a day off it would be late afternoon before you know it and you'd be thinking about dinner or tonight's TV only for that to soon become something you did (or didn't do) as you were lying in bed reflecting on your day.

Maybe this is why some people get so bitter and twisted, because they see life whizzing past and there's nothing they can do about it? 

And then there's the fact that when you pass 60 you begin to, morbidly, notice the ages of people who are dying, either around you or 'famous' people. The number who die in their 60s which leaves you with this scary possibility that you might actually be entering one of your last laps around the year. People in their 70s makes you count the years between how old you are now and how many years you have if they made it to that specific age. Then there's the thought of making it to your 80s and 90s; you could technically still have a quarter of your life left, in some cases even a third, but it comes with added bonuses, such as ill health, inability to do the things you can do now, which in turn makes you realise that the things you can do now are considerably limited compared to the things you could do then...

So, tie this subconscious knowledge of your mortality and link it to the weather. Why was 1976 such a great summer? Was it the blistering heat? Was it because we were considerably younger and therefore it felt like it went on for so much longer? Or could there be another factor at play? I often wonder what people who live in Arabian countries perceive as the passage of time, because they live in a place where the weather is pretty much the same every day of the year, whereas we live in a temperate climate, which means our weather changes more often than someone with OCD changes their underwear or washes their hands. 1976 felt like a long hot summer because it was but also because every day felt like an extension of the day before. It was literally blue skies and hot temperatures every day of the week from May to the end of September, with the exception of three days of torrential rain over August Bank Holiday - just to prove the weather loves to be ironic.

Here's another thing about long hot days - you grow tired of doing anything but avoiding the heat, so even if you're at work you often find yourself staring into space, looking for an excuse to not do anything because doing something means sweaty and uncomfortable. When we get great weather, the kind we moan about not having, we then tend to look at it from inside a house (or a car) and think perhaps we should go and enjoy it but it's easier to sit and do nothing. This might not apply to everybody, but it is an actual things; so if you live in countries that have six months of hot sunny weather followed by six months of warm sunny weather perhaps the lack of change makes time drag?

Then there's the thing that pisses me off. I know that at 62 with an underlying health condition that every year has to be savoured and appreciated; that means doing things in the summer that I enjoy because I know I don't do much in the winter. Even if it's little things like reading a book in the sun, sitting in a beer garden having a pint, walking in the sea or going out with a pair of shorts on, these are things I look forward to do doing and every year we have a shit summer I've got one less year to do these things. I haven't sat outside in a pub garden since 2022 and since 2020 even if the weather has been fine going to the pub hasn't been easy at times. There was a time when I'd put shorts on in May and they'd stay on until the end of September. This year I've worn shorts for no more than three days at a time because the rain or the temperature has forced me back into trousers or jeans. 

Also, in case I forgot to mention it, as we get older time goes quicker - yes? Then that means summers are quicker, so are springs, but why do autumns and winters feel like they drag? Is it because of the lack of daylight? Or maybe it's because in the spring and summer when the weather is shite, we're constantly looking forward to when the weather will improve, but during the autumn and winter we know the weather is going to be shite so we don't have the same expectation? I often wonder if winter people have the same perception of time that summer people have? I think they must because the wife is an autumn kind of person and she's always complaining about time flying by. 

Science tries to explain why time appears to get faster the older we are. Scientists suggest everything from dopamine levels to something not dissimilar to what I've been yakking on about - after the age of about 20, humans become more adept at measuring time, which in turn means that as we become better at doing it time appears to speed up. This doesn't explain why as kids we manage to cram a lifetime's worth of fun into a summer holiday or maybe all of that just happened in our heads? We're told that memories are not strictly accurate, so maybe as time passes our memories simply make it feel like we did more when we were kids?

One thing is for sure, most people fear dying when they're young, which is understandable. However, as people get older, move closer to a time when they will cease to exist, very few are as frightened of it. Yes, there is trepidation and some fear, but there's also other things which only older people truly understand. I sometimes feel dreadful - not because of my underlying health issues, or too much booze, or some other reason; sometimes I just wake up, wander to the loo or down to the kitchen and my body aches and I realise that when I was a kid I got what my mum called 'growing pains' and now that I'm older I'm getting what I call 'aging pains'. I mentioned this to a friend of mine a couple of years ago, a man in his 80s, and he said "It doesn't get any better. Some days your body just screams at you for existing." As someone whose legs ache the day after a long walk and my neck and shoulders appear to be rebelling against the rest of my body, the thought of extended pain as I get older is as scary AF. That's before arthritis ravages older bodies. I mean, why do we not tell younger people about how shit it is to get old? 

Maybe this is why some people move to warmer countries. Perhaps it's not so much to do with the weather, but more to do with monotony and it's ability to make you perceive time slowing down? Obviously warmer weather makes the bones and muscles ache less - at least that seems to be the excuse given. There is also this scientific search to understand why we age and to see if we can slow it down or even stop it. Can you imagine a 160 year old person? If they weren't just a wheelchair full of pain and moaning, they'd also get up on the morning of January 1st and by the time they were ready to go to bed it would be the end of September and it would have rained for most of the time...