Weathering the Weather

Here in Edinburgh the winter has been good so far. When the south was getting day after day of rain, we had those perfect cold winter days – frosty, the sky clear and brilliant blue, the air so cold it almost feels fizzy on your throat like champagne.

This weekend it all changed.  Violent winds, with 90mph gusts in some places, torrential rain which turned sleety and has now left a wet slushy coating on everything and outside now it's grey sky right down to the ground. I don't need to go out tonight so I can look for a good book and huddle by the fire.

Since my books have rural settings, the weather always plays a big part. In Devil's Garden, the new book that's coming out in June, DCI Kelso Strang has to cope with the major storm that hit the country at the end of February last year, the one that became known as The Beast from the East.

It actually stranded me in London, with no trains getting through to Edinburgh until they could get snowploughs through the drifts that had shut the line at Carlisle, so I remembered it all very clearly. The only trouble was that when I was actually writing about it, it was sunny and warm and we were having meals in the garden and it was a real effort of the imagination to get back into feeling what my characters would be experiencing.

I've had that problem before, when the work is going well and I'm really absorbed.  When I reread, I find that I've described what I'm seeing out of the window instead of what the characters would be seeing – leaves on the trees, perhaps, which would be very confusing to a reader who has been under the impression that the action takes place in November. If I fail to notice even then – well, that's where the copy-editing comes in – see my last post!

One of the other problems is knowing what flowers or trees you can expect to be in flower at which time of year – I spend my life looking up botanical references. Birds too are a bit inconvenient – here we have a lot of migratory ones and you have work out when the ones you've chosen to feature aren't still enjoying themselves in sunnier climes.

Which brings me back to the book I need to take my mind off the weather tonight.  Out of Africa, perhaps – or would that just make me miserably discontented?. Maybe I'd be wiser to pick up T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with all the horrors of desert heat to remind me how lucky I am to live where I do.

I find myself muttering a little rhyme my mother used to say provokingly when we were complaining about rain spoiling holiday plans: 'But we'll weather the weather whatever the weather, Whether we like it or not.'