I left the Island on the 0700 ferry yesterday morning. When I left home at 0530 it was dark. Dark! Last time I left on the morning ferry it wasn't just light, the sun was almost up. For me the weather isn't the defining factor of determining when winter starts or ends. Nor is the solstice. So far as I am concerned it is winter when one leaves for the morning ferry in the dark.
Living on Lewis gives one a rather different view of life in so many ways. For me it is not really the weather that defines the seasons. It can rain cats and dogs at any time of the year. Summer gales are (or appear to be) becoming more frequent. The average temperatures in the winter and the summer don't appear to differ anywhere near as markedly as, say, Cheshire where I used to live before I came to Lewis in the '70s.
When I was writing that I wondered how much of it is perception (those long hot summers of my youth and the bitter winters of, say, 1947 - which I can remember!) and how much is reality. So I looked up the averages. What I've not been able to find out is what period of years the averages cover.
The one statistic that stands out of me is the daylight hours. Like all statistics though it they don't tell the full story. There may be only 18 daylight hours on average in June but that doesn't tell the whole story. The sun just dips under the horizon and, on a clear night, one can still read a newspaper at 1am (if one wants to waste those beautiful moments reading a newspaper - personally I'd rather walk along the beach).
