The UK famously has really, really bad weather. But, it’s not bad. It’s just plain rubbish.
The aggravating, mind numbing part about it is that it isn’t bad in any sort of exciting way. It’s just dismal. Drear. Wan. You know, grey. It’s cloudy, and wet, and cold. You see? It’s bad because it’s miserable.
I mean, rarely is there a real storm to get the blood coursing. Hardly a tornado to speak of. At best, there’s a sort of spinny sneeze from a large man. There’s a general dearth of El Nino events, ice storms, cyclones, and we even come up short on falls of snow. Even little ones.
It has to be said that fog is something that the English geography can rustle up from time to time, and although of course what that means usually is just a very effective type of greyness in the day, sometimes, just sometimes, it can produce some quite amazing sights. Especially when your house is perched on top of a hill, looking out over the valley of Bradford. Like ours.
I took this shot from our window last week. Sadly, my camera didn’t do a very good job of capturing the effect (look, it was the camera, not me!), but you can just see the other side of the valley rising out of the mists, especially the giant chimney of Manningham mills. Behind that is a dark strip which is the hills of Clayton and Queensbury. Underneath that mist? Bradford. And honestly, it looks far better this way – trust me.
(Click to see the larger version.)