A Son of the Rock

Woke up this morning to snow on the ground in Kirkcaldy. It was more or less gone by one o’clock, though.

I remark on this since, in all the twenty years I’ve lived in this house, there has been less than a handful of times – this morning included – snow has actually lain for any length of time. (Note, here, the past participle of to lie, and not of to lay.) Only once was there ever enough snow for my sons to build a snowman or go tobogganing in Beveridge Park – which is just over the railway line from our street.

Partly this is because we live reasonably close to the sea and the temperature is therefore always slightly higher than just a hundred metres or so inland and so we rarely get snow. It is noticeable that the snowline generally starts a bit up Oriel Road. Its higher elevation as well as more distance from the Promenade helps explain that.

In my youth in Dumbarton snow was also relatively unusual – it used to start where the Clyde narrowed at Old Kilpatrick and the warming effect of the river lessened.

This did not of course apply in the winter of 1962-3 which was famously severe and during which I actually stood on Loch Lomond. I believe this was itself not a patch on the winter of 1947, which was in addition made to seem worse by the austerity of those post-war years, my father told tales of folk burning old shoes as fuel – but I wasn’t around then.

Otherwise I do not recall snow falling, and lying, before New Year, except once.

It’s still November and a week to go before December, at least five before New Year. A harsh winter ahead? In August I noted an early onset of leaves going brown.

I remember reading somewhere in the early autumn that the weather patterns in Britain this summer resembled those of 1962 and that such patterns had a tendency to repeat themselves after gaps of years.

Just what we need! Credit crunch, banking collapse, the world financial system tottering around our ears and a possible harsh winter. (You read it here second.)