
I don’t know why I should be surprised – cold weather in Scotland in November,* shock horror – but even given the fact it has already snowed this month, I wasn’t expecting to wake up to temperatures of -5C this morning and neither was the poor olive tree which I still hadn’t got around to moving to the warmer climes of our porch last night. Hopefully the olive tree will wake up from its cryogenic adventure – apparently they are tougher than you might think, especially if they have been watered before they get frozen which is not a problem around here. And nor have I put the ice tyres on my bike yet, so stop asking.**
This lunchtime, once the road had safely thawed out, I headed off for the paper to discover the OTHER big disadvantage of living two-thirds of the way up a long hill, which is that when you don’t need to turn a pedal for the first ten minutes of your ride, you get very, very cold. As in cold enough to make your eyeballs ache, which is a new one on me. Looking on the bright side, I also arrived home considerably less sweaty than I usually am after tackling the chief disadvantage of living two-thirds of the way up a long hill.
I do remind myself every morning to take a moment to appreciate the views (when we can see them) because I suspect that this winter I will be regularly paying the price for our wonderfully exposed position. Even as I write, the latest weather warning is rattling the windows, but the woodburner is doing its stuff and the olive tree is safely tucked up in its winter quarters and so, for now, am I.
*especially as the Met Office has already predicted a colder than average three months, in this genuinely interesting if somewhat cagey article – I’d heard of El Nino and La Nina, and the polar vortex, but the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation was a new one on me. No mention of the weather gods, though, for some reason
** Although come to think of it, that may be the very thing we need to reverse polar vortex and unleash the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, and return us to milder winter weather.