All The Seasons in One Day

On the Cleveland Way near the Sutton Bank Visitor Centre, there is a notice warning you not to set off walking unless you have the right footwear and some good waterproofs, as you can get the weather from all four seasons in one day.

We're always going on about the weather in this country, perhaps because there's a lot of weather to go on about.

I love sunny days: but I've often wondered whether I would like to live somewhere where there's near-permanent sunshine. I think I'd like it for quite a while, certainly - here in Britain sunshine and heat is still rare enough to be considered a novelty. Especially if there was somewhere to swim! Sea, pool, lake and even river - - I enjoy them all.

But I love the different looks that the changing weather brings to the British countryside. And guess what, I'm going to illustrate some of those looks from photos I took on our recent narrowboat trip. I don't have a particularly posh camera, or any particular photographic skills - (I keep thinking I should learn more and stupidly never getting round to it!) - but I do love the countryside and here are some photos wot I took. If you'd like a better look, if you click on them they will enlarge.

Genuine British Dull Grey Clouds. We get a lot of these:

Four- o'clock- in- the- morning streaky sky: - you can see the boat on the left - I nearly fell in the canal taking this one in my sleepy state.

Early-morning mist with a sunny day to come. Yes, I know we had a Morning Mist Photo yesterday. I just happen to like early-morning mist, so here's another one. Sorry.

And one of my favourites: Lowering Clouds with Sunshine.

I still have a painting that Graham Battye gave me years ago, of somewhere in Derbyshire with light like this, and I've always loved it.

However, let me give you a Handy Hint on this one.

If you happen to be travelling along on a narrowboat, thinking that it might be nearly time to moor up for the night, and you see skies like this, then it is probably a good time to STOP.

What I did was go hey! Look at that sky! I'll take some photos of it! And perhaps we'll outrun the clouds. After all, narrowboats speed along at about four miles an hour - - no problem!

Can you guess What Happened Next?

So when the torrential downpour started, and we thought it really might be a good idea to moor up, like NOW, suddenly we were at a part of the canal where instead of having nice straight banks with grass, we had lots of shallow mud instead, enabling the boat to get nicely beached on several occasions before we found a place to moor.

I must say that the two men on board, Stephen and Silverback, did a lot of Manly Things with reversing the engine and pushing with barge poles to free the boat again, and were remarkably good-humoured about the fact that they got very, very, very, very wet in the process.

But one of the good things about British weather is that it can always change for the better. And this was the next day, coming into Skipton in the early morning sunshine:

I loved it all. Every minute. Even the soggy ones.