A Free Man

“Squeaky swings and tall grass
The longest shadows ever cast
The water’s warm and children swim
And we frolicked about in our summer skin

I don’t recall a single care
Just greenery and humid air…”

-Death Cab For Cutie - “Summer Skin”

I wasn’t going to write this post. There are a number of reasons for that: it seems kind of trite to write about the weather, I thought I would take on a British “mustn’t grumble attitude - keep a stiff upper lip and get on with it, and with Dr O’C pregnant it’s actually good that it’s been cool in air-conditioning free Britain. But over the weekend a few things have happened and my attitude has changed and I am frustrated enough for a rant. First of all I got drenched to the bone on the way to and from work on Friday in full waterproof garb, again. Second, the Thames burst its bank today and flooded low lying parts of Oxford. Finally - and this was the straw the broke the camel’s back - my tomatoes are dead.

If you pay any attention to the weather widget on this site you may have noticed that in the month or so that I’ve been working on this site it has yet to breach 70 degrees F. Yes, this is July - meet the Great British Summer (TM). When we first moved to Britain, an Australian friend of Dr O’C’s warned us that sometimes Summer just doesn’t show up. I laughed it off and attributed it to the Australian tendency toward overstatement. The last two summers that we’ve been here have been good. Generally by June or July you get warm (75-80 F) days with a fair bit of sun. The long days (nearly 18 hours of daylight in midsummer) mean that you can really enjoy the summer days outside. Sometimes it even gets really hot - up to 95 F during parts of August. That’s actually really unpleasant as its humid and there is NO air conditioning in Britain. Fortunately I’ve been in the air condition USA for the last two Augusts. But generally, the Great British Summer is as advertised - beautiful long mild days, lots of sun, few bugs amongst the rolling green fields of England.

But this year, the formula has been all wrong. We had some really nice warm days in April, a sign of a wonderful summer to come, I thought. Wrong. Very wrong. Since then, the temperature has rarely gotten above 70 degrees, we’ve had very few sunny days, we had record rainfall in June and are on course for record rainfall in July. Most days the weather person describes the forecast as “unsettled”, a euphemism for cold and crappy.

The flooding, I guess, is what happens after two months of record rainfall. Until this week it was mostly flash flooding up north. With all the excess water this week Britain’s two biggest rivers, the Thames and Severn burst their banks. The Thames runs through the center of Oxford and when I took the dog out walking this morning, even through my half-sleeping haze I noticed that there was a lot more water about. Fortunately we live up on a hill these days, but in either of our previous houses I may have stepped into a foot of water when I came downstairs for my morning coffee - would have woken up quick, I suspect.

And then there were my tomatoes. In June I spent two days clearly brush, including blackberries, unidentified briars and stinging nettles, to make a patch for some tomato plants in our back garden. I lovingly turned over the soil, planted four Roma tomato plants, mulched and de-snailed. I’ve been weeding and fertilizing and spraying - not watering, mind, no need - for over a month. A week or so ago, we had a cold snap with the night time temperatures dropping to about 40 degrees F, or enough to seriously screw with my poor plants. When I went out to weed this weekend, this is what they looked like.

I’ve just realized that moaning about my tomatoes may sound flippant when compared to people’s houses flooding. And that’s a fair criticism. 1,500 people were evacuated from their homes in Oxford to the soccer stadium - obviously these folks didn’t see what happened at the Superdome. Strange Scottish Girl was evacuated after there was a foot of water in her house, she didn’t have to go to the stadium, at least. But really the flooding in Oxford’s not that bad, we’re pretty well protected. There’s been some property damage certainly and plenty of pictures on the news of flooded cow pastures and people canoeing down a street in a foot of water (there’s always someone in a canoe - where do they find these people?) It’s the villages upstream and towns along the Severn that got it bad. I’m not smart enough to know if this has anything to do with global warming but the left-wing press is certain that it does while the right-wing press is equally certain that it doesn’t, must be nice to go through life with such certainty.

Now, I am not stupid enough to have moved to the UK for the fantastic climate. But a couple of hot days in a row in July wouldn’t seem to be too much to ask. The worst thing is that I’m not going over to the States for field work this year, no therapeutic weeks in the hot and humid corn field. No respite from the Great British Summer. Oh well, mustn’t grumble…

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