Category: Weather

Life on the Ocean Wave – Again?

In 2010, we were living in France, and often made the trip back and forth between our home there and England courtesy of the cross-channel ferry from Boulogne to Dover. One April, in 2010, we had a Bad Experience. This week, we’re off to Spain, by the same route (well, Dunkerque rather than Boulogne). And the forecast is beyond awful. By the time we arrive in Dover, there will have been 50 mph + winds for more than 24 hours, rising to 70 mph as we arrive. Reader, we have cancelled the ferry (but lost our money) and booked the Chunnel instead. Why don’t you sit in front of a cosy fire and read about our Bad Experience?

Life on the Ocean Wave?

We generally cross the English Channel by ferry.  Neither of us is keen on the Tunnel, and a nice breezy trip on a boat always seems a cheery, day-out-by-the-seaside way of travelling between England and France.

Not that Dover’s much fun.  Despite having some elegant and interesting buildings, Dover always seems a dingy, down at heel and down-on-its-luck sort of place. And this time, it looked as if we’d have longer than usual time to kill there, because LD lines sent a late text saying our ferry would have to leave at 1.30 p.m., not midday, and we’d arrived in town just before 10.00.

Why not go down to the port, then, and see if the ship before had been delayed, and whether it could perhaps squeeze us in?  Down at the booking office, the news was that because of atrocious weather, the 6.30 a.m. sailing still hadn’t been able to leave.  But it was loading, but if we hurried, we could go too.

We hurried.  We caught the ferry.  We regretted it.  Even behind the harbour walls, the ship was pitching and tossing.  As we started our voyage, the well-named tug DHB Doughty struggled to keep us on some kind of suitable path between the harbour walls.  Out among the waves and spray of the open sea, the ship immediately started to lunge, roll, and sway, and kept up this uneasy surging throughout the trip.

I’ve always been a rotten sailor, but told myself firmly that this time it would be different: it was just a case of mind over matter.  Less than 10 minutes later I was sick for the first time.

Nearly an hour and a half into our hour and a half journey, the French coast was nowhere near.  Then the captain announced that some cargo had come adrift, and we’d have to stop till it was sorted out.  Half an hour passed.  Then yet again it was Our Captain Speaking.  There was, he said, a Force 10 gale going on.  He didn’t propose to risk getting into the harbour in Boulogne in these conditions.  We’d just have to sit it out.  I went green.  I went yellow.  I went glassy eyed. I used up several sick bags.  So did half the passengers.  The other half (including Malcolm) only had boredom and ailing partners to contend with, but they weren’t having a lot of fun either.  Malcolm struggled off to find water for me, and found broken crockery all over the cafeteria, books and souvenirs strewn over the shop floor, and the toilets awash.  He lurched back empty handed, though stewards came round with water and sympathy later on.

And we sat, hunched miserably in our seats, until finally, the captain reckoned there was a slight change in the weather. At last the French tug Obstiné brought us into port .  Those tugs with those inspired names were the cheeriest things about the whole journey.

The photos show the sea hitting the harbour in Boulogne.  That’s the sea as it lost power and hit the coast, not the raging sea we’d been putting up with in what felt like mid ocean.  For six long hours.

Next time there’s a storm, I ain’t sailing.  I’ll just sit it out on dry land.

Thanks everyone for commenting about the Featured Photo debacle. It looks as if the problem may lie with our phone settings (particularly for Android users), and sorting this out is currently beyond me. As reading your posts and commenting either on them, or on my own posts may be too – for the rest of the week – as we plan for and embark on our 1800 km journey in less than ideal conditions.

Nevertheless… Happy New Year!

Rushing Round Two Nature Reserves

Our local Nature Reserves tend to be chilly in December. Especially when, as today, the wind is making its presence felt. Best to rush round the bulrushes and hurry home for a mug of hot chocolate. Sunny days, though, are available, for a gentler amble. My header photo is from Nosterfield on a sunny day. A wintry trip to Staveley was distinctly nippy,

For Debbie’s One Word Sunday: Rush

The World Didn’t End in 2012

Back in 2012, we were living in France. And if we’d believed the doomsayers, not for very much longer. Here’s the story as I told it on my blog, after we’d spent the day with our walking group near the Pic de Bugarach.

Bugarach: ‘Doomsday Destination’

December 15th 2012

As we get nearer, the mist clears.
The castle at Coustassa glimpsed through the mist

Cold.  Pale thin fog baffles the contours of the hillsides, and those of the distant castle at Coustassa.  Glimmering frost bristles the short maquis grass beneath our feet.  A watered lemony sun high above us attempts to burn winter away, and eventually does so.

The mists begin to clear

That’s when we have our first view of Bugarach – shown in the featured photo – the imposing thick-set mountain which dominates this part of the Aude, because it stands alone, rather than as part of a range, and today is pretty much thatched in snow.

Bugarach has been in the news for a while.  Here’s BBC’s ‘From our Own correspondent’ back in July 2011:

‘According to an ancient Mayan calendar, at some point towards the end of 2012, the world will come to an end.

It is not clear how that will happen, but apparently humanity does not stand a chance – except for those who seek shelter in the area surrounding Bugarach.

Just 200 people live there all year round, but doomsday believers and spiritual groups are convinced the village has magical powers, thanks to the local mountain – the Pic de Bugarach.

For years, rumours have circulated on the internet that extra-terrestrials live in the mountain, and come the apocalypse, the top will open and they will emerge with spaceships, and rescue the local inhabitants.’

Although it’s quite hard to entertain the idea that the mountain might have some sort of underground UFO car park, there are plenty of people who have done so, and with great fervour.  Here’s today’s Daily Mail, which has been talking to Jean-Pierre Delord, Mayor of the tiny village of Bugarach (pop. 176).

‘On Wednesday, he will close the village for five days to anyone who doesn’t live here or isn’t already booked to stay, and draft in hundreds of police, military, firemen and Red Cross to ban any gatherings, shut off the mountain and arrest anyone silly enough to try flying over it.

‘What if tens of thousands of people turn up?’ he says, throwing his arms up in the air. ‘I have no way of knowing what will happen. I have no crystal ball! I don’t care if people want to chant naked or talk to the trees, but I have to protect my villagers. I am responsible for them.’’

He’s not over-reacting.  Local house-owners have been able to rent out their homes for the period in question for astronomical prices, and even camping spots are going for 400 euros a night.  For most locals though, the whole thing is at best a nuisance, at worst a real headache.  The nearer we get to December 21st, the more people descend on the area, and the police and army are already involved in keeping order.

We enjoyed our views of Bugarach, as ever.  We spent time pretending to look for UFOs and generally mocking the New-Agers who are so convinced by the end of the world as we know it.  Then we got on with the business of enjoying our walk in the here-and-now.  Here are a couple of photos showing what else we saw that day

This is a walk past dozens of capitelles: shelter for sheep farmers & vineyard workers in former times.
Glance away from Bugarach, and you’ll see the Pyrenees.

Update: December 14th, 2024. As you see, we’re still here. And so are you.

For Debbie’s Six Word Saturday

Monday Window, Monday Sunrise

A sunrise captured in one of our downstairs windows one December morning. This image always makes me happy, so I’ll make it a bonus post for Ann-Christine’s This Made Me Smile challenge too.

For Brian’s Monday Window,

And Ann-Christine (Leya)’s Lens-Artists Challenge #326 – This Made Me Smile

Moody Autumn

On Tuesday morning, I was quietly dreading my shift as volunteer Roaming Ranger in Studley Royal Deer Park. ‘Raining’ was an understatement. As I was driving over, the wipers sliced savagely across the windscreen, ineffectually sweeping away the rivers of rainwater cascading over the car. Signing in, we volunteers on various parts of the estate commiserated wanly with each other, and went our separate ways.

But outside, the rain had suddenly and unexpectedly decided to stop. Instead, familiar trees, now turning autumn gold and russset could just be perceived through the mist. A familiar autumn scene, especially here where we have three rivers in town to add to the general miasma of an October or November day.

Much later in the morning, as I was completing my shift in a much cheerier frame of mind, autumn’s third and best mood showed itself. Omnipresent autumn colour in the form of leaves cascaded to my feet to be eagerly shuffled and crunched through as I willingly connected with my inner child.

I offer a selection of photos to illustrate these different moods. I didn’t take my camera with me on Tuesday. The weather and the forecast were so very poor I just didn’t dare expose the poor thing to the elements. More fool me, to believe the weather forecast.

My featured photo is looking through our kitchen window on Tuesday morning. There’s more of the same on the way …

For Ann-Christine’s Lens-Artists Challenge #319: Setting a Mood

Brolly Time

Any UK readers will have had plenty of occasions to recite a favourite childhood ditty this week.

Rain, rain, Go to Spain,
Never show your face again.

James Howell, an Anglo-Welsh historian added this verse to the traditional English rhyme ‘Rain, rain go away/Come again another day’, as a reminder of the failed invasion of the powerful Spanish Armada in 1588. They had intended to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and restore Catholic rule over England.

Like now, for instance. But we’re all safely indoors, so let’s peer out at a few rainy shots. I hope you have an umbrella.

Count the brollies in these two shots, and they’ll add up to seven.

Umbrellas waiting for the monsoon in India
Not England. San Sebastian. In Spain. The ditty worked …

And here is an all-too-typical English shot.

For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.

And Becky’s Seven for September.

Wuthering Heights: Tourist Destination

This week, A Canadian blogging pal, Rebecca of Rebecca’s Reading Room reflected on re-reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It made me think of a post which I wrote six years ago, in which I described a walk in Emily’s footsteps. Now it’s not really playing fair to re-post something I published before for the Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions Near and Far. But I’m going to do it anyway. How many walking routes does anyone know in the UK where the way-marking is in any language other than English? Here, they’re in Japanese. This wild and often unforgiving part if England has become an unlikely tourist Mecca for devotees of Brontë’s story of the passionate and tumultuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

Wuthering Heights

28th July 2018

Haworth: a charming village on the top of a high and steep hill, in an area of high, bleak and steep hills; home to the Brontë sisters and the surrounding moorland countryside of Wuthering Heights.

Cottages near Haworth. Cosy now: possibly less picturesque back in the Brontë’s time.

Everyone knows that you can expect ‘weather’ when you come here,  whatever time of year you arrive.  As you stumble along the church path to leave the village, slashing rain tumbling from sullen hostile skies needles your skin, slicks your hair to your face and saturates your clothes.  As you set your face against the wild wind, your boots sink into the sodden peaty turf as you trudge onto the moor.  If you dare to glance up, you see unending moorland before you: bleak, barren and bare, with sheep huddled against the dry stone walls which march across the landscape.  This is Nature-in-the-Raw, and we expect no different.

I went there earlier this week.  None of the above applied.

We are in Week Five of a heatwave.  I doubt if either the Brontës or even Heathcliff himself had ever seen the like.   Brittle coir matting now carpets the brooding moorland fells: and several weeks early, the heather is almost in flower, rich and purple.  Yellowing grasses replace the dense green turf the sheep prefer, whispering and rustling in the light breeze.

Beyond Howarth, coir matting stands in for moorland turf.

There’s a little brook in the valley here.  Angry peaty water jostling officiously along its path has been replaced by still, clear shallow pools.

The brook by Brontë bridge.

The Brontë sisters would cheerfully have paused here to rest, reflect and write a little.  Then, like me, they would have slogged on, up the peat-and-stone pathway that leads upwards, ever upwards, towards Top Withens.

There’s Top Withens, up there. Beside that solitary tree.

Top Withens may have been the isolated upland farmhouse that Emily Brontë pictured Cathy Earnshaw and family living in when she wrote Wuthering Heights.  It’s a ruin now, the roof torn off in a violent thunderstorm in the 1890s.  Just as you’d expect.

It was the perfect picnic spot for me.  The moorland stretched before me, its hillsides rhythmically rising and falling.  The world was silent: not that silence in which there is no sound, but that of the living countryside: the low susuration of the swaying grasses; the humming of the wind in my ears; the occasional complaint of a bird sweeping overhead.  Beyond the moorland, greener fields lay, chopped centuries ago into rough rectangles by drystone walls.  Some held sheep, some cattle, others recently cut hay. The sun warmed my rocky seat, and I was perfectly content.

Except for the sky.  The day was sultry, sweaty, but freshened by a soft breeze.  I knew the sun might be chased away by gusty rain.  Ash-grey clouds swelled and receded, revealing granite tones behind: and beyond that, cornflower blue once more. It was a signal.  Haworth takes weather seriously.  Never be tempted to climb these uplands without a very capable waterproof in your kit.


 The moorland I saw this week was not the Brontë’s moorland.  It’s been a little sanitised.  There are helpful finger posts pointing the way at every junction, in English and … Japanese.  

Top Withens or Top Withins? Take your pick. I don’t know which the Japanese choose.

The pathways the sisters trod are no longer springy peat tracks, or sticky muddy gullies.  Instead, heavy slabs line the way, to prevent footfall damage to this fragile area from the hundreds of people who tramp these paths looking for the Real Brontë Experience.

My day was far too comfortable for that.  I was not returning to a draughty parsonage with self-destructive brother Branwell to worry about.  If you want to see the Brontë’s life through his eyes, read Robert Edric’s ‘Sanctuary’. You’ll be glad to get back to bustling tourist-destination Haworth for a nice cup of tea.

This post should qualify for a mention in Jo’s Monday Walk, I hope.