I still have one walk left to do in my Lake District project and today might have been a day to go — but no. Good weather in 2024 has been at a premium. And so, that particular milestone will have to wait another three weeks at least.
I was supposed to be flying out of St Helena today, but I, and the, roughly, 75 other people due to make this trip have been obliged to stay there for another 24 hours thanks to the fierce and gusty winds which were blowing over the island, despite it being otherwise a nice, sunny and quite warm day. Of the six flights I have now made to and from St Helena, two of them have been so delayed. Well, never mind, there are worse places to wait it out. The anemometer was spotted above the Castle in Jamestown, and seemed appropriate. The wonkiness of the background is not my error: much of St Helena actually does look so non-perpendicular.
Depending on how I count the days in transit, today could be reckoned the 50th day I have spent on St Helena across my three trips — and it was, certainly, the one with the worst weather. Jamestown, on average, gets 9-10mm of rain in the month of May, yet at least that amount fell today. It started overnight, and this morning there was already a dirty brown stream running down Main Street and debouching into the sea. It carried on, too, heavy showers every few minutes all day, really quite foul weather. And at points up in the hills, correspondents reckon there might have been some 100mm (4 inches) of rain through the day. Not normal…
I was forewarned about the fogs that affect the coast of Namibia. The Benguela current sweeps cold water up from Antarctica, and as it passes the African coast it mixes with the warm air coming off the continent. But just because I understand the climatology doesn’t mean that the actual experience of the fog hasn’t come as a surprise because they really are bloody cold; the mornings and evenings here in Swakopmund have not at all been like one might imagine an African beach holiday, more like Morecambe in November. These two swimmers must be seriously hardy.
The sun still seems uninterested in putting in an appearance, and this picture seems to epitomise the general colouring of the UK at this time. Manchester did get a bit more interesting for me later, but that still doesn’t mean it became sunny.
This family (I suspect, a boy and his grandparents) were not the only ones wondering what they were doing outside this afternoon — particularly watching Brighouse Town, who slumped to a 1-5 home defeat. For the last 60% of April 2024 I will be somewhere with better (and certainly drier) weather than here — but I’m not there yet.
Amongst other things that 2024 has lacked (like, my teaching, a ceasefire), I do not yet recall one of those ‘first day of spring’ moments: the kind of day, in England anyway, where it suddenly warms up, the sun starts shining and everything goes, ‘Hello….’. If it has already happened, I missed it. And 12/3/24 wasn’t it either.
Having had the chance to survey reasonably large portions of Ulster, the Irish Sea, North Wales and bits of north-west England on my flight home — I would like to declare that at 11:15 this morning, Llandudno and the Great Orme, both definitely depicted here, constituted the only part of this whole slab of the world that could possibly be seeing any sunshine.
This shot was actually incidental to the walk I completed today — my penultimate Wainwright walk, unless there is some big change of plan between now and, say, the next month. Skiddaw was nowhere near where I was. But — it looks so good here. All macho and domineering, despite its sheen of snowy white. Would that we could all look so good at a few million years old.
Time to return to the CN Tower, still the tallest ‘free-standing structure’ outside Asia, and as I did successfully get up it this time, the highest I have ever been above ground in a building. The Skypod observation deck is still 330 feet further above the main deck, from where I took this picture, so this is about 1,130 feet, looking west along the shore of Lake Ontario, the distant towers are in the suburb of Mississauga I think. The CN is basically a glorified bar-café-restaurant, but it does have a damn good view. It’s the tallest thing around by such a margin that everything else just looks tiny.
Being 42 