Rain kept our lives on hold all through January and most of February and for a while, I began to wonder if we hadn’t made a mistake relocating to the UK.
Jack and I didn’t have any definitive travel plans in the pipeline, just the promise of an Italian garden tour which we first booked in 2020, had to cancel due to the pandemic, and have yet to re-book due to availability of all parties concerned. Walks were restricted to 7km circuits around the village due to the incessant rain, and even days out were off the agenda because frankly, I was too cold to leave the house. And it hasn’t even been a particularly bad winter.
I admit that there were many times over those two months when I reminisced longingly over life in Portugal, and before that in the Canary Islands, where the only time the weather restricted movement was when it was too hot (mainly Portugal) or there was a tropical storm (Tenerife).
But at the end of February the rain finally stopped, and milder weather suddenly allowed the world to open up again.
Since then, we’ve had a mini-break in Bath; walked two excellent routes in Exmoor; begun to explore the walking in other parts of Somerset; and are looking at further short city breaks in the UK. We’re even looking at booking the long-awaited Italian Garden Tour.
A love-hate relationship with rain
I love rain. I am, after all a Mancunian where rain is part of life.
When we moved to Tenerife, we chose to live in the north with its lush, sub-tropical landscape rather than the hotter, drier south. It’s more important to me to be surrounded by greenery than it is to wake every day to unbroken sunshine and a paucity of rain. Rain is life. In winter we got rain mainly in November, February and early March and often it came in the night. If it rained in the day, we simply didn’t go out. In the 14 years we lived there I never owned an umbrella, and I could count the number of days rain stopped play on the fingers of two hands. For a Mancunian, that really doesn’t count.
In Portugal we lived in the Setúbal Peninsula, an area that sees its fair share of rain in winter and experiences long periods of drought in summer. By the time October came around, we silently begged the weather gods to turn down the heating, open the skies, and let it pour.
But here in rural Somerset, a rainy winter makes it impossible to walk paths over fields of quagmire. As we design self-guided walking routes, we need to record directions, take photographs, and describe views, all of which become impossible if it’s pouring down.
Here comes the sun
As I type, we’ve had gorgeous sunshine and above-average seasonal temperatures for the past week, and suddenly the world has awakened. The verges and parks are brimming with daffodils, the air is filled with birdsong, and the weekend had a soundtrack of lawn mowers. On Saturday we went walking in the east of the county where ice cream vans were doing a brisk trade and pub gardens buzzed with activity and laughter.
It’s amazing what a difference the arrival of the sunshine makes, and it seems to me that here in the UK, it’s much more appreciated than it is in southern Europe.
In both Tenerife and Portugal, we, like every other resident, took the sunshine and the mild temperatures for granted, only really noticing strong variants in either direction but here, the arrival of spring is cause for celebration. It lifts spirits, puts smiles on faces, and returns an air of optimism to the world.
Tonight, temperatures are expected to drop back to their seasonal norms for the next week, and no doubt rain will once again return but it doesn’t matter. We’ve been given a precious insight into the very near future and that’s all we need to get us through.
Right, where shall we go next, Cardiff or Norwich…?
