COUNTRY LIFE
European Weather
This little Northern Island of ours often enjoys—if that is the word—a sort of weather almost peculiar to itself. It is far warmer than its latitude and vastly wetter along its west than its east coast. In this exceptional spring Scotland, Wales and England have shared their weather with a great part of the Continent ; and not only their dryness and sunniness but their frosts. There were, for example, eleven degrees of frost in the valleys of the Lea and Mimram very much on the same date that a frost of similar intensity was culling the early vegetables in the neighbourhood of Florence. The width of the area over which the type of weather was more or less constant for a long period was a godsend to the prophets : they have seldom or never been so accurate in their pro- gnostications. It is, of course, a general truth in the art (it is hardly yet a science) of forecasting weather that it is much easier to exercise it in fine than in foul weather. The good announces its own patient continuance. The evil is wholly untrustworthy and may be furtive. Incidentally on the general subject it would help the cause of good English if the B.B.C. would prefer " weather " before the abominable phrase "weather conditions."
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