I made breakfast in daylight for the first time in ages the other day.
And yesterday I started work at 7am – which still involved driving there in the dark, but not for much longer!
There are flowers on the clematis – spring is springing. There’s hope on the horizon. We’ve turned the corner.
Once we’re going to work and coming home again in daylight, we’ll feel like the winter is just about over.
I’m looking forward to evenings spent in the garden. I might actually do some gardening, or I might just sit with a glass of wine. Whatever – I’m looking forward to it.
When you live in the UK, you get used to the seasons – and the daylight – coming and going.
Winter evenings by the fire are good too. Draw the curtains, get the kettle on. There’s something to be said for it. And if you find that the long dark nights get you down, at least you know that this too shall pass and the evenings will start to get lighter again.
I was lucky enough to visit Australia a while back. And I spent a bit of time in the tropics in my youth. These huge swings from dark mornings and evenings to light mornings and evenings simply don’t happen closer to the equator. In Australia sunset is between 6pm and 6.30 pm – all year round. Summer and winter. The sun sets at pretty much the same time in August as it does in January.
Australia is a very hot and sunny place – but they don’t have long summer evenings. In the tropics the sun sets quickly – there’s barely half an hour between full daylight and full darkness. Nothing much in the way of dusk or twilight.
I know we complain about the dark nights in the winter – dark by 4pm, doesn’t get light until after 8 o’clock the next morning. But if we didn’t have the long dark nights over the winter, we wouldn’t have the long light evenings in the summer.
I love nothing better than to go for a walk at about 8 o’clock in the evening during the summer – there’s still some warmth in the sun, the birds are singing. It’s a peaceful end to the day. I miss it over the winter. But if I lived in a place where the length of the day hardly changes, I would miss it all year round.
I lived on Shetland for a while (yes, that’ll need a blog post or two!!). For those of you who don’t live in the UK (and, to be fair, for many people who do) Shetland is the most northerly group of islands off the north coast of Scotland. They only just make it on to the screen on the TV weather forecast and on maps they’re usually in a box. They’re further north than the southern tip of Greenland. The nights are long in winter. They had a special word for the part of the year around midsummer when the sun hardly sets at all – they call it the Simmer Dim. It would still be daylight at 11 o’clock at night, and starting to get light again by 1 in the morning.
Of course, they pay for it at the other end of the year when it’s still dark at gone 9 o’clock in the morning and the daylight’s fading again by 3.
Unfortunately, just because the days are starting to get longer again, we’re not out of the worst of the winter weather. Looks like we’re going to have to be battening down the hatches this weekend. Weather warnings for the whole of the UK by Sunday – keep warm and stay safe!!
Scroll all the way down to Follow, Share, Like or Comment on this. And check out my ‘Sixty and Me’ badge.
I always reply to Comments from nice people.
