Accurate Seasoning

Jeez, I used a lot of commas in my blog posting yesterday. It’s like I was doing a Sponsored Overuse of Punctuation for charity or something.

Anyway, moving on:

We had a chat at work today about the different seasons, and when we think they start. The Met Office are very firm in their dates – Spring is from March 1^st, Summer from June 1^st, Autumn from September 1^st, Winter from December 1^st – but we all agreed that those dates don’t really tally with the modern world and the modern climate. We all threw in our own ideas, and talked from personal experience of when we each considered the seasons to start.
For some of the others, it was an external trigger like seeing the first daffodil (for Spring) or seeing the first frost (for Winter), but it's difficult for me – I think of them as a frame of mind and an atmosphere, rather than corresponding to a particular event or day on the calendar. It’s just a feeling I get as the air changes and the temperature fluctuates. (Hence why I felt like Winter throughout August).
After a bit of thought, though, and looking back over my entire life (not just the last few climate-change-altered years), I think I can pin it down to these:

SPRING – starts when you first hear a cuckoo (those of us lucky enough to still hear them)
SUMMER – starts once the trees are fully leaved (and the hedges are thick and green)
AUTUMN – starts when the children go back to school
WINTER – is everything after Bonfire Night, up to the time of the cuckoo (as mentioned above)

I got through all that without using too many commas, but Christ I used a lot of parentheses….

RC 11-9-21