England's weather is the best in the whole world

Drizzle grizzle - England's summer and its favourite conversation.
When we talk about the weather, precarious bridges form over the boggy landscape of our English reserve. Weather waffle is tentative touching each other, in a youth hostel lounge under a slow ticking clock, for example, where it is always quiet like a library or a bus queue or some other English speciality. But in the mighty cause of world peace, which is the beauty queen's and my own nightly dream, talking about the weather gives us English a slight advantage over other nations: we don't need a common enemy to bring us together, we just talk about the weather and social cohesion is the natural result. (Do I have to say that that last bit was ironic? It's just that if irony is mistaken for something said in earnest, faces crinkle up in ridicule, disgust, horror and so on and some sort of trouble usually follows. I'll say this only once: about 53% of this blog is going to be ironic, although I'm not sure which bits). The weather, then: we have the best weather in the whole world so we do. It's better than the weather in all the other countries, maybe even better than all the others put together, anwhich makes our weather an untapped source of nationalist-supremacist pride. I suppose I'm talking about Britain, now, although no-one really knows what Britain refers to, because it's not the same as the British Isles or the United Kingdom, and so it's also not the same as England, Scotland and Wales put together, because they include the islands. Anyway, back to the weather... We have a maritime climate so we get those fluffy clouds that make great shadows sweeping over fields and we have massive rainclouds that cruise across the sky like battleships with nothing to do. You don't get clouds like that in central Europe and that's a fact. Our skies are in perpetual dance - sun, wind, moon, cloud, rain, snow and... that's it. The wind, which the Indians encountered as the breath of God that animates all life - we got loads of that here, wind. And the great sunsets we enjoy over Dutch skies: clouds after the rain that seem torn up and left like translucent dust sheets to float over each other in layers, purple, orange and even green if you look closely. (They're called Dutch skies because the Flemish master painters put them in their landscapes, but actually we get those skies first - they cross Cornwall first on their way up from the Gulf of Mexico, and only then do they get to on to visit Holland and Belgium, so we found them first). And then there's the sensual pleasures of weathers - the vivifying attack of a sudden cloudburst, the hand of the wind running through our hair, the shiver of pleasure down the back as a gust of chill air ruffles under our clothes. Amazing English/British weather - source of aesthetic delight, primal sensual pleasure and social cohesion. But don't we moan about it: too cold, too wet, too hot, too windy are the favourites. Very occasionally, we throw our arms out, throwing off our cloak of English reserve, and proclaim to everyone, 'Isn't it glorious!' (which is a rhetorical question, of course). I say that for the sake of balance, for we do sometimes like our weather, but we never call the drizzle glorious, do we? No, and that's a shame, because that's what it's been doing all day here. I had to cycle in the drizzle from Penzance Station to the youth hostel, a whole mile away. It's true, it made me slightly damp but I didn't moan. For me, unending drizzle means endless pleasure as it dribbles coldly down the small of my back. There is nothing so edifying as cycling uphill in a howling drizzly headwind. I wonder if these other holiday makers feel as proud as I do about our weather. I'll ask them.

Just ignore all that, if you will. Tomorrow I ride out to Lands End and then, inshallah, up the north Cornish coast. My bike is very heavy. There are 15 other cyclists cycling end-to-end in the youth hostel tonight. To make this trip a bit special, you have to do it with one leg or, as my colleague Michael saw the other day, in a Sinclair C5. I've no such special things, unless I saw off a limb or trade my tourer for a Penny Farthing, except that I'm sort of vegetarian, and everyone knows that vegetarians can't run. Actually I'm the sort of apostate vegetarian that eats fishes, snubbed by 'true' vegetarians and accused of hypocrisy by meat-eaters.

Ttfn, David