13 posts tagged with "Almanac"

There is a particular silence that precedes wind. Not the absence of sound, exactly, but a quality of waiting, as if the atmosphere itself is holding its breath before deciding what sort of day it intends to inflict upon you. I have spent forty years on this island cataloguing such silences, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that no barometric sensor, no algorithmic forecast, no grinning television personality has ever captured this phenomenon with any accuracy whatsoever.

I will not name names. Nikolas Faros.

There is, I have long maintained, a profound dignity in doing absolutely nothing. The olive tree outside my window understands this. It has not produced a single fruit since November, and I respect it enormously for that decision. But the olive tree is merely dormant. It has not, as far as I can tell, reduced its heart rate to four beats per minute, dropped its body temperature to near freezing, or gone several months without eating, drinking, or visiting the bathroom. For that level of commitment to inactivity, one must look to the hibernators.

I feel compelled to begin with an admission. The moon, that serene disc I have watched from my terrace for more decades than I care to count, produces absolutely nothing. No light. No warmth. No original thought. In this respect, it shares a surprising amount with Nikolas Faros, though the moon is considerably more reliable.

Twice a year, a substantial portion of humanity participates in a collective ritual so bizarre that if you described it to someone who had never heard of it, they would assume you were joking. We move every clock in the house forward one hour in spring, then backward one hour in autumn, and we do this because a New Zealand entomologist wanted more daylight to collect insects.

I am not making this up. I wish I were.

I have been staring at clouds for the better part of four decades, and I can report with some confidence that they have never once lied to me. This is more than I can say for most weather forecasts, several former colleagues, and the entirety of Athenian television meteorology.

There is a moment each morning, roughly twenty minutes before the sun hauls itself above the Aegean, when the world is neither dark nor light. The stars have mostly surrendered. The horizon glows with a colour that has no honest name in English, something between apricot and catastrophe. Fishing boats become visible as silhouettes. Cats, who have been awake for hours doing whatever it is cats do at 4 a.m., pause briefly to acknowledge the change, then resume their inscrutable business.

There are moments when light forgets its manners. It stops travelling in polite straight lines, abandons its composure, and throws itself across the sky in extravagant arcs of colour, ghostly rings around the sun, or shimmering curtains of green that have no business existing at all. These are the moments when sensible people stop walking, tilt their heads back, and forget what they were doing. I have observed this behaviour in fishermen, postal workers, and once in a goat, though with the goat I cannot be entirely certain of the cause.

I was sitting on the terrace last Thursday, pipe lit, coffee lukewarm, watching a perfectly unremarkable cumulus drift over the Aegean. Harmless. Decorative, even. The kind of cloud Nikolas Faros would point at with his manicured index finger and call "partly cloudy, temperatures mild." And he would be right, technically, which is the most irritating kind of right.

There is a number on your phone, somewhere between the weather forecast and the pollen count, that most people ignore entirely. It sits there, modest, unassuming, occasionally accompanied by a small sun icon. The number is the UV Index, and it is, I assure you, more important than whatever Nikolas Faros said about Thursday's cloud cover.

I should say at the outset that predicting the weather has always been a fundamentally absurd enterprise. The atmosphere is a chaotic fluid system with more variables than any civilisation has ever been equipped to measure, and yet we have been trying to guess what it will do next for roughly four thousand years. The fact that we now occasionally succeed is less a testament to human genius than to human stubbornness, which may, in fact, be the same thing.