had not been so lucky, and water was still being pumped out of it into the road.
I knocked on the door and it was opened by a young woman with short brown hair.
‘We’re closed because of the floods,’ she began, looking at me as if I were stupid. But when I explained what I wanted, she invited me inside.
Several regulars were sitting on benches reading newspapers in the gloomy half-light. A couple of others were helping sweep mud off the stone floor. Everyone agreed that the flooding was getting worse.
‘This place is rotting,’ complained the landlady. ‘There is constant damp from the rain and sewage.’ She poked disapprovingly at some blistered paint on the lower walls. ‘It just keeps getting flooded. In the past it didn’t seem as often – now it’s twice a year. It’s just constantly, all the time. It’s hard enough to make a living in this trade as it is, without all this happening.’
‘Thirty years ago you knew what the seasons were,’ one of the regulars added, leaning on his broom. ‘Now you don’t know. It’s got to be to do with the way the weather changes – the rainfall is unbelievable.’
I drove out of Monmouth and into Wales, the first mountains rising up in the distance. It was raining again, and just before Crickhowell flood warnings appeared by the side of the road. A small house next to a layby was completely surrounded, the water so deep in places that only the tops of the roadsigns stood out. I reached Machynlleth and my old friend Helena’s house, on the west coast of Wales, long after dark, and lay awake listening to the rain hammering on the roof long into the night.
Machynlleth has a small museum-cum-art gallery called the Tabernacle, a compact slate-roofed building not far from the railway station. I headed down there in the morning with Helena. Not being a huge fan of the abstract oil paintings on the wall, I tried instead to engage the white-haired old lady behind the front desk in conversation. It’s always easy, whether you’re in England, Scotland or Wales, to strike up a conversation about the weather.
‘Terrible weather, isn’t it?’ I ventured. The old lady carried on arranging some leaflets on the desk. I noticed her hearing aid, and tried again, more loudly.
‘TERRIBLE WEATHER, ISN’T IT?’
‘Oh yes,’ she answered, ‘such a lot of rain.’
I nodded encouragingly, and she went on. ‘The last few years we’ve had more rain than I ever remember.’ She paused. ‘And no snow either. The last proper snow,’ (and she emphasised the word ‘proper’ to show that she meant snowploughs, the town cut off and so on) ‘was over twenty years ago. The snow we’ve had in the last few years has been hardly anything. Instead, it’s been rain, rain, rain.’
On sale next to the desk were several Christmas cards, each showing children making a snowman under a heavy winter sky, the pretty white flakes swirling around them as they gathered up the snow in their duffle coats and woolly mittens. It was the traditional British winter, everyone’s dream of a white Christmas. And what no one knows – or likes to admit – is that it’s probably gone for good.
SNOW PLACE TO GO
Snow was becoming a rarity even during my childhood. Apart from the years in Peru, I grew up in a small Nottinghamshire village called Colston Bassett – a tiny place with little more than a pub, a primary school, and a local dairy famous for its pungent stilton cheese. Every autumn the village held a harvest festival, when all the local farmers would bring their produce into the village hall for a lavish evening meal. I looked forward to it for two reasons: because I and the other village kids were allowed to get drunk on cider; and because it meant the onset of winter.
I loved winter. From the first frosts in October to the bursting of the buds in April I’d scan the skyline almost hourly for snow. It came, too: we even got snow on Easter Sunday one year. In January 1987 it fell so heavily overnight that the drifts piled up against the side of the house and meant a day off school. The school bus got through after a couple of days, but the snow lasted for almost a fortnight. Every winter there’d always be a few centimetres of snow which would generally last for two or three days. I was filled with barely-suppressed excitement each time the first flakes fluttered past the school windows.
I haven’t seen snow like this for over seven years in Oxford, which isn’t too far from where I grew up. Back in 1996 there were a few days of snow (no big deal, less than ten centimetres deep. I remember it principally because I fell off my bicycle on the ice) but since then nothing. In fact snow has become so rare that when it does fall – often just for a few hours – everything grinds to a halt. In early 2003 a ‘mighty’ five-centimetre snowfall in southeast England caused such severe traffic jams that many motorists had to stay in their cars overnight. Today’s kids are missing out: I haven’t seen a snowball fight in years, and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a snowman.
A quick glance at the official weather records for Oxford confirms my rather hazy impressions. The last decent snow was in 1985, when there were twenty-one days of snow cover. The winter of 1963 was the most extreme in England since 1740, and during the 1970s snow days averaged about eight days per season. How things have changed. Six out of the last ten years have been completely snowless, whereas between 1960 and 1990 there were only two snowless winters during the whole three decades.17
By the 2080s our grandchildren will only experience snow on the highest mountaintops in Scotland, because over most of the English lowlands and the south coast snowfall will be virtually unknown.18
Other familiar things may also look very different. Take the average British garden. Lawns will need mowing all year round, and will die in summer droughts unless heavily watered. Traditional herbaceous border species like aster, delphiniums and lupins will also struggle in the dry soils. Tree-ferns, palms, bamboos and bananas will replace holly, oak and ash. Many fruiting trees and bushes need winter chilling for bud formation, so blackcurrants and apples will need to be replaced with peaches and grapes. Overwintering bulbs need low temperatures to stimulate their development, so gardeners will need to dig up the bulbs and refrigerate them for a few days in order to coax spring flowers out of them. New pests and diseases will spread out of the greenhouse and into the open garden. Aphids, for example, begin their infestations two weeks earlier for every 1°C rise in temperature.19
Many of these changes are already underway, but have been accelerating over the last two decades. Termites have already moved into southern England. Garden centres are beginning to stock exotic sub-tropical species, which only a few years ago would have been killed off by winter.20 In Surrey, horse chestnut trees now come into leaf twelve days earlier than they did in the 1980s. Oak is coming out ten days earlier, and ash six days earlier. Winter aconites are now flowering a month earlier than three decades ago, and crocuses – which used to flower in March – are now putting out petals in mid-January.21 The average UK growing season is now longer than at any time since records began in 1772. In 2000 there was hardly any cold weather at all: the growing season extended from 29 January to 21 December, leaving just thirty-nine days of winter.22
In the summer of 2003 temperatures broke through the crucial 100°F level for the first time in recorded history, peaking at 100.6°F (38.1°C) on 10 August at Gravesend in Kent. Continental Europe, meanwhile, suffered its highest temperatures for 500 years, sparking
