Come rain or shine…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/27/alexandra-harris-weatherland-writers-british-weather

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Earlier this month, when the weather where I live flipped from extreme and unseasonal heat to apocalyptic storms over the course of just a few hours, it so happened that I was reading Weatherland, Alexandra Harris’s capacious book about writers and artists under English skies (the pair of us were due to meet at a literary festival). And perhaps this was why I felt relatively unbothered by the barometer’s strange, seemingly teenage mood. I had, I think, a certain sense of perspective, for Harris provides the long view, taking us from Hadrian’s Wall in Roman times – how its guardians craved woolly socks! – right through to Ian McEwan’s clammy novel The Cement Garden, a story he began writing in the heatwave of 1976.

Harris’s book is a breathtaking feat of knowledge and clear thinking, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, whether it is Anglo-Saxon cold that suits your disposition or energetic, modernist sunshine. In its pages, she touches on everything from Elizabethan windows to Victorian fern worship to the origin of the term “London particular” (these thick fogs, she suggests, were named after London particular Madeira, which was fortified with extra brandy to suit the city’s more alcoholic tastes); a surprisingly resonant section of the book is devoted to the Claude glass, a dark convex mirror used in the 18th century by artists and walkers to tame and prettify their view of the landscape, much as their 21st-century equivalents might use the camera on their mobile phones.

But it’s her people I will remember long into the future, and the dripping/ sweaty solidarity I periodically felt with them. Deep inside Weatherland, I found myself sheltering beneath a metaphorical umbrella first with John Donne and then, much more miserably, with Thomas Hardy (Donne, too, worried that the weather was changing, the power leaving what seemed to him to be an exhausted sun, while for Hardy, as for me, rain was mostly just a kind of indifferent blankness). More surprisingly, I ended up sharing a deckchair, if not a bottle of suntan lotion, with John Milton and Philip Larkin, a Puritan and a gloom merchant respectively, but men who nevertheless liked to catch a few mood-improving rays whenever they had half a chance.