Forecast: A Diary of the Lost Seasons

Forecast is the most urgently needed, most important book I have read in a very long time.

Michael Morpurgo

Joe Shute is one of Britain’s finest writers on nature. Or indeed, any other subject.

John Lewis-Stempel

This urgent, elegiac book’s call to mend our broken relationship with the land feels more vital by the day.

Mail on Sunday

With a journalist’s eye for detail, Joe backs up his captivating anecdotal evidence regarding the seasons with the results of solid scientific research to finger the culprit: global warming.

BBC Countryfile

An absolutely beautiful account of life going on while the world stopped. I loved it.

Kate Bradbury

Joe Shute illuminates in beautifully clear prose, laced with well-judged literary and historical references, the scale of the threat posed to our natural world by Climate Change. A ‘must read’ for anyone who is curious and who cares.

Jonathan Dimbleby

This is no ordinary nature diary – it enlarges our perspective of what has altered, and what is being lost [...] one of the most poignant and affecting nature books I have read this year.

Miriam Darlington

What a wonderful read. Told through the eyes of farmers, poets and philosophers as well as the author’s own personal explorations across the country, Forecast is a beautifully written elegy to our natural world and a warning of how quickly it is changing.

William Sieghart

Forecast is a triumph of the most unnerving sort.

Simon Ings, The Daily Telegraph

Full of information and very enjoyable.

Bird Watching

A Note on the Author

Joe Shute is an author, journalist and weather watcher with a passion for the natural world. He writes features for The Daily Telegraph and is the newspaper’s long-standing Saturday ‘Weather Watch’ columnist. He is currently a postgraduate researcher funded by the Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Cities of the Future at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Joe studied history at Leeds University and started his career as a trainee reporter on the Halifax Evening Courier before working at The Yorkshire Post as its crime correspondent. He previously wrote A Shadow Above: The Fall and Rise of the Raven, published by Bloomsbury in 2018. He lives with his wife in Sheffield.

@JoeShute

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Contents

Chapter 1: A Lockdown Spring

Chapter 2: Weather Watch

Chapter 3: Storm Clouds

Chapter 4: Seasons Past

Chapter 5: The Changing Harvest

Chapter 6: Exodus

Chapter 7: Budburst

Chapter 8: Winter Sleep

Chapter 9: Muirburn

Chapter 10: Melting

Chapter 11 Waterland

Chapter 12: The Vast Machine

Chapter 13: Weather Notes

Chapter 14: Solstice

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee

Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII

The seasons are against us.

Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, 21 September 2020

CHAPTER ONE

A Lockdown Spring

It takes three weeks for spring to travel up the country, moving north-east at a rate of about 2mph. As I drove along the A1 in the early days of the first spring of a new decade, I wondered at which point I had passed it by. There was nothing else to overtake but the rising sap, roadside blossom and unfurling leaves. The Great North Road was so deserted I could drift across the white motorway lines.

Buzzards starved of roadkill perched on the treetops staring blankly over the empty asphalt. Some deer had ventured out of a patch of trees to graze the grass verges, nitrogen-enriched from the exhaust pipes of the tens of thousands of vehicles that on any usual day would be passing by. Insects spattered against the windscreen with a ferocity I had not seen since childhood, smearing a blood mosaic across the glass.

The road signs blinked STAY AT HOME. Police patrols were randomly stopping the few cars they could spot. But in my pocket was a piece of paper granting me special access to this spectral road. In the early days of the 2020 lockdown, brought in to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had suddenly gone from being a journalist to a ‘key worker’. And my newspaper had tasked me with travelling the length and breadth of the country, from north to south and coast to coast, to discover how communities were responding to the deadly new virus in our midst.

Over the course of that week on the road, my photographer colleague and I stopped at motorway service stations populated solely by the animated screens of Costa Coffee self-service machines. We passed Stonehenge, where the empty car park – normally filled with coaches – reminded me of a go-kart track. At night we stayed in any hotel we could find that had remained specially open for key workers. 

One dilapidated seafront guesthouse near Eastbourne we shared with doctors working on the Covid wards, who didn’t want to go home for fear of spreading the virus. As we passed one another on corridors that smelt of hand-sanitiser and bleach, we each shrank into our side of the wall, doing our best to crease our masked features into a recognisable smile.

Another hotel, an imposing Victorian building with sweeping views across Morecambe Bay, reminded me of the Overlook in The Shining. We were the only two guests staying among hundreds of empty rooms spread over two wings. The cavernous dining room was perfectly laid for a breakfast that never happened. We took our meals as instructed, alone in our rooms, watching the news for updates of the daily death toll and of the condition of the Prime Minister, who was in intensive care after contracting the virus. 

Do you know what the people we met wanted to speak most about that week, as life as we knew it transformed before our eyes? The weather. That lockdown spring was, paradoxically, the brightest on record. March gave way to the sunniest April, which in turn became the sunniest May ever witnessed (at least since records began in 1881). It was the fourth driest May, too. As every day dawned to another endless blue, I had a sense of Covid-19 bending time. 

So many of the seasons which normally dictate our year were, in a matter of days, rendered meaningless. The football season, the fashion season, the fishing season, the wedding season, academic calendars and holiday dates, all evaporated from diary pages as if drawn in invisible ink. 

Four seasons, however, remained. Their passing suddenly gained an importance that had been forgotten in the hurried turmoil of modern lives. People spoke of the scales falling from their eyes and wondered if the birds always sang this loud, or had we just started listening to them? Amid the spiralling death toll and fear of every interaction with a stranger, spring, the season of regeneration, erupted in glorious technicolour.

My lockdown road trip ended in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, where in 1665 residents cut themselves off from the outside world for eighteen months after an outbreak of bubonic plague, to prevent it spreading to the surrounding area. I interviewed residents who in some cases could trace their families back to the original epidemic and were now shielding from coronavirus in the very same seventeenth-century cottages as their ancestors once had. Standing there talking to people the agreed distance of two metres away in the threshold of the old plague cottages, rarely had I been so aware of the elasticity of our ties to the past.

I returned home to nearby Sheffield to commence my own period of self-isolation. Among the strange must-haves during that period – sourdough starters, tomato plants and so on – was a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus. My mum sent me one in an early Covid care parcel and reading of the fate of the people of the Algerian port city of Oran, gripped by an outbreak of bubonic plague, I was struck by similarities with our own situation. Not least, the weather. Camus wrote of the ‘incessant sunshine’ weighing heavily on the plague-ridden town as the death toll crept up. The French word for weather, temps, is the same as for time, and I started to feel a strange interlocking between the two.

Weeks blended into months as I watched spring pass. Every morning before settling down to write, I took a walk through my local woods. In my garden I counted the species of birds and insects and the flowers that had come into bloom. This in itself is nothing particularly new. Since moving here with my wife three years previously, we had both always kept a close eye on life in our garden. But suddenly I was able to watch the season on a level of intimacy my peripatetic life as a journalist never normally affords.

I found a baby newt in the pond on 16 March, heard the first chiffchaff of the year on 18 March and on 24 March spotted a tortoiseshell butterfly dancing across the forget-me-not sprays. I watched crows digging up moss from the lawn to soften the nest they had built in an ash tree at the end of our garden and a pair of goldcrest excavating the old brick garden wall for the same purpose. A pair of dunnocks built a nest in a climbing hydrangea on the side of our house. One morning I found a tiny blue egg that had toppled out and cracked on the paving slabs below.

On 18 April came a reminder that it is not just viruses that speed across the world. ‘Hirundo Domestica!!!’ wrote eighteenth-century naturalist Reverend Gilbert White in his diaries, marking the first swallow of the year. I spotted my first swallow of 2020 as I cycled to the top of a hill called Long Line in Sheffield during my hour of daily exercise; it swooped low over my head, its fork-shaped tail streaming behind.

I had come here hoping to see swallows. The road, which as its name suggests heads dead straight from the city’s southern suburbs up to the Peak District, often swirls with them in the summer months, though I had never spotted them quite so early before.

I wrote an article about my swallow sighting in the newspaper and received a flurry of responses from readers who had just seen their own first birds of the year. Beaminster, Dorset on 9 April, the Lizard Peninsula on Easter Saturday, Oakington near Cambridge on 17 April, and on the twenty-first a solitary swallow over Blenheim Palace. The messages contained little more than this basic information but each one told me a story of quiet satisfaction: a sense of surety that even in the grip of a pandemic the swallows still come back. The poet Ted Hughes’s oft-quoted line about swifts is equally applicable to their hirundine cousins, the swallow. Their return marks a sense that the world is still working.

Another reader got in touch, a man called Graham White (no relation, I presume, to the aforementioned Reverend Gilbert), who mentioned to me he had seen his first swallow that year over the Cotswolds on 5 April. Graham told me he had been keeping the dates of swallow arrivals since 1977. Back then the birds would first arrive at the very end of April, but slowly as the decades have passed the date has crept forward. The previous year, Graham wrote, the first birds were spotted on 30 March.

He admitted that rereading his old swallow lists stirred up fragments of memory: of former girlfriends, and of once thumping a man for cheating at a fishing contest. These are the links between landscape, weather, memory and nostalgia that I want to explore in this book: the hawking swallows just one of many needles stitching together the tapestry of the year. How the weather, and the great seasonal orchestral moves it conducts, shapes our own sense of time.

I also want to explore how this relationship is shifting, profoundly so, in the era of climate change. To bridge the void between our cultural expectation of the seasons and what they are actually doing. To follow the march of the seasons up and down the country and document how their changing patterns affect all of our lives. And to discover what happens to centuries of folklore, identity and memory when the very thing they subsist on is changing, perhaps for good.

Back in the eighteenth century, for example, the first swallows would sometimes not be sighted until June. White, along with other naturalists of the period, felt the idea of migration was a flight of fancy. More likely, they presumed, the birds were hibernating underwater during winter, or hunkering down in chimney pots to see out the cold months in a state of torpor. 

As we have unpicked the secrets of their sub-Saharan migration in recent decades, that epic journey has started to alter as the birds, like us, try to make new sense of the changing seasons. Studies by the likes of the British Trust for Ornithology have found that swallows are these days arriving from their African migration a fortnight earlier than in the 1960s, and breeding a full eleven days earlier. The warming climate is changing what we presumed to be fundamental seasonal rhythms.

In recent years, swallows have been spotted by English county recorders as early as February, while there have been numerous reports of the birds even over-wintering in the south of the country. In doing so they are answering the prayers of the pastoralist poet John Clare who longed for swallows to brighten up the darkest days, ‘twittering as wont above the old fireside/ and cheat the surly winter into spring’.

In late May I received another snippet of swallow news – and it wasn’t good. A man called Chris Jones, who runs an organic cattle farm in mid-Cornwall, which has been in his family since 1960, spanning three generations, had for the first time in his life not seen any swallows arrive. Usually they stream in across the 170 acres he farms in early April, building their nests, like earthen hanging baskets, in the corners of his old stone barns and swooping low over the meadows in pursuit of the insects rising up from the steaming cattle dung. On any given year he receives about thirty nesting pairs, but during 2020 – save a few lone birds overhead – not a single one came to stay. 

When we speak by phone it is a windy day and Chris, who is sixty, says normally he would delight in watching the birds take a breather on the telephone wires strung across his land. By then the drought that had accompanied the record sunshine had started to take hold and his pastures were beginning to brown over. Years ago he lost his breeding pairs of cuckoos, another harbinger of early summer with deep cultural roots, but the absence of the swallows hit him particularly hard. As long as he has been here the swallows have always come, he said. The loss felt personal, as if somehow a link had been severed between himself and the land.

‘It is utterly devastating on a spiritual level,’ he told me. ‘I like to think I’m fairly in tune with what is going on with nature around us and the swallows are usually like something you can almost set your watch by every year. There are bigger swings of the pendulum these days, between hot, dry, cold and wet, and so many things seem to be conspiring against them.’

On the night of 5 April that year, a storm had whipped up over the Aegean Sea around Greece just as swallows and swifts were migrating north. Southerly winds pushed the flocks into air currents north of the Aegean that proved too powerful for many of the already exhausted birds to fly through. Over the following days the bodies of dead swallows and swifts were found in the streets of Athens, on seaside apartment balconies, Aegean Islands and a lake close to the seaport of Náuplia. The death toll, according to the local authorities, was in the thousands. 

Were Chris Jones’s swallows among them? Perhaps, but regardless his story tells us of something that rests at the heart of this book. How the great meteorological shifts of a rapidly changing climate are influencing the seasons as we understand and relate to them. How the weather, our weather, by which as an island nation we somehow define ourselves, is morphing into something beyond the reach of our cultural memory. And how the landscape and our own perceptions of ourselves are changing with it. The writer Richard Mabey defines our local understanding of the seasons as ‘weather accents or dialects’; fine tunings between weather and habitat. And these accents are becoming blurred.

So much of any discussion of this falls prey to nostalgia, of course; a misguided sense that somehow the weather always used to be just so when that was never the case. But what is equally clear is that as the pendulum swings ever more wildly with each passing year of the twenty-first century, time can no longer be relied upon as it once could. Our connection to the seasons, and in the process a deeply rooted sense of self and place, is slowly being lost. 

Coronavirus is a disease that has exploited our societal weaknesses. It thrives on the margins, exacerbating the political blind spots ignored by successive governments, picking off the old and the vulnerable, the frontline workers driving buses and making hospital beds, and proving particularly deadly for ethnic minorities. One of the lesser, and stranger, cruelties of the virus is the manner in which it deprives some sufferers of their sense of taste and smell, in some cases for months on end. I know of friends in the early wave of individuals to catch the virus who experienced those early weeks of spring as if watching through a window. They could feel the sun on their skin and hear the nascent birdsong but the essence of spring was somehow lost.

The aroma of the season is always its most powerful component, conjuring a medley of all that has come before. It is a sense interlinked with the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts of the brain lodged deep in the limbic system that allow us to experience emotion and retrieve memory. The intoxicating scent of blossom in the air, fallen leaves mulching underfoot or rain after a prolonged period of drought all stir up these scattered pieces of our lives.

During that spring, unable to travel beyond the immediate confines of our homes and neighbourhoods, our minds raced backwards towards that muddled state pitched somewhere between regret and contentment where the British often find themselves most comfortable. We dug out old recipes and baked all the flour off the shelves. We gathered round the television to listen to an address by the Queen and spoke about conjuring the wartime spirit of the Blitz. We re-read old books and re-watched old television series. On one evening in June, the 1966 World Cup final was even replayed in its entirety. In the face of life as we knew it changing completely, we huddled under the comfort blanket of our own shared sense of nostalgia. This, aside from football, being our other national sport.

Lockdown engendered the curious paradox of the incarcerated, whereby the days drag and yet the months race by. Although in this respect I had something of a head-start. Life can enter into a similarly amorphous state when you are struggling to conceive – as at that point of lockdown my wife, Liz, and I had been for several years. It is a painful and occasionally crushing experience that alters your perception of time. The monthly cycle had become for us something to adhere to far more strictly than the seasonal one. Summers turned to winters and back once more and still we remain stalled.

Over these years attempting to create new life together I have found myself beginning to highlight aberrations in the seasons: an external way of giving meaning to the building sense of disquiet at something not quite right within.

CHAPTER TWO

Weather Watch

I am a weather watcher. For a decade I have written a weekly column on the very last page of the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph, documenting the weather of the British Isles. I was given the column not through any burgeoning talent for meteorology but because of my love of nature, folklore and history. ‘Write about anything but the weather’, was my editor’s somewhat cryptic instruction when I first took over the page, particularly so bearing in mind the column was entitled ‘Weather Watch’. ‘And whatever you do, don’t try and forecast anything.’ 

That, however, proved prescient advice. Whenever I have attempted to predict anything too precise, I tend to get it spectacularly wrong. My very first column, in fact, elicited a letter of complaint from a man living in Baltasound, the largest settlement on the Shetland Isle of Unst – the most northerly inhabited island in Britain. It was a warm weekend in May and I had foolishly written that largely unbroken spells of sunshine were forecast nationwide, bar ‘those poor shivering Shetland souls lost in a persistent band of rainfall’. His missive was curt, pointing out contrary to my erroneous reporting the Shetland Isles had in fact enjoyed a balmy few days of marvellous weather. Like all the notes I have been sent by readers over the years, I still keep his objection in a folder. ‘To readdress your Anglo-centricity,’ he wrote, ‘I suggest you visit the islands. Currently the wild flowers are at their best, the summer birds have returned, we will barely see any darkness until August. There could be no better place to be.’

Embarrassed as I was, I also could not help but feel a flicker of pride that my column had made it all the way to the Shetland Isles (albeit a day late: my complainant told me the Saturday Telegraph does not actually arrive on the island until Sunday, and he generally does not get round to reading it until the following Monday). Fortunately, it was not a mistake deemed serious enough to remove me from my berth.

‘Anything but the weather’, I have come to realise, means writing about how the changing seasons make us feel. It means tracing the literature, art and music our weather systems have inspired. It means trawling though folklore to describe the curious customs and rituals we have created in response to the weather. It means understanding the extent to which the weather we have grown up with has shaped each and every one of us. And in recent years it has meant noticing and reporting how far and how