Friday 31st October
We have English Sky TV here so it looks as if you are having similar weather to us, but maybe not quite so hot. Here it is clear blue skies and cold in the morning but it warms up rapidly and between 12 and 3 it is really warm. Over 25 degrees every day. It soon cools off, but even the evenings aren’t what I would call really cold. The weather never ceases to amaze. Here in Eymet August was dull by their usual standards, a few hot days but many were cloudy and we had a bit of rain. Much like England, but here September and now October is just wonderful. Everyone is commenting on it.
But while we all, me included, love nothing more than sitting in the sun and feeling that gentle warmth going right through you it may be the visible signs of something else. Global temperatures keep rising and are remarkably in line with computer predictions. Even when we have a wet summer the underlying temperature, night and day, is higher than a few years ago. There have been some strange reversals such as an expansion of Arctic sea ice, though some scientists can still explain this as Global Warming. Ever since the Financial Crisis of six years ago the whole Environmental thing has been off the Agenda. Politicians pay lip-service to it but know that the public will not be happy to pay the price of reducing emissions and using less power, especially at a time of Austerity.
And now that we have fracking apparently so successful in America the whole argument about less dependency on oil and fossil fuels is harder to present. And we are all like lemmings, sitting in the sun and smiling as the planet slides into another phase. It will probably take a real disaster to begin to wake us up at all. In the meantime I must dash, just one more hour of daylight to enjoy.