Ron McMillan's Blog
Whether Weather
People ask how I like being back in Scotland again after yet another long stretch in Asia, and what ought to be an innocent enquiry often seems larded with preconceptions. Even after thirty years of coming and going, I am struck by how the question arrives laden with the implication that so much about life here is somehow rather dreadful.
Perhaps if I was here for the long-term, unable to cling to the pleasing prospect of being re-united with Asia within the coming months, I might share such negativity. But that I do not means some of my views come from a standpoint that beggars belief among fellow Scots. I am, of course, talking about the weather.
Instead of seeing the climate here as gloom defined, I relish its ever-changing conditions, and with them ever-variant light, the stuff of photographers’ and watercolourists’ dreams. Granted, when rain hoses down it does so minus the pleasure I associate with tropical downpours, but just as we can dress for the cold (and be assured, in the tropics, no change in garments can properly offset the heat), so too here we can put on a layer to deal with the rain. [Am I the only person on the High Street dumbfounded by people of ages who should know better, walking in shirt sleeves or shoulderless tops when the temperature is in single digits?]
Surely anybody who ever savoured moody landscape paintings in Scotland’s superb art galleries would relish the ever-variable light show in our skies. But apparently they don’t, and by dint of such thoughts alone, I render myself the odd one out.
I fall into my own pedantic trap by making an issue of something so immutable as the weather. But when the streets of Scottish towns are aglow with Jaffa-orange sunbed tans and the medical world warns of rising numbers of malignant melanoma cases among young Scots females, the national obsession with what our elders knew as a ‘healthy tan’ truly has a dark side to it.
As with all obsessions, this one has a flip side; while the masses flock abroad to clutter every available Continental sunstroke source, stunning Scottish locations lie astonishingly empty of domestic tourists.
And when it comes to my favourite spots in the land, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Not that I don’t hope BETWEEN WEATHERS might inspire a few new visitors to sample the delights of Shetland.