MY father used to reckon we always experienced bad winter weather following a cold season in the US of A.

My own experience of that country was somewhat mixed. At one end of the spectrum was the pattern of summer weather, which ripened the pecan nuts so they could be harvested and sold into the Christmas market. If they were late ripening, it meant waiting 12 months.

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For just a few years I was involved with pecans. My man in Atlanta used to quote from the Old Testament: “God created Heaven and Earth and all life in six days. On the seventh day he rested, and while relaxing from all that creation he viewed his handiwork and said to himself, ‘I didn’t get that walnut right, did I?’, so he went back and created the pecan nut. Pecan. Easy to store, easy to open, with brittle shells and great contents. Pe-can.” Accent, in good old Southern drawl, on the second syllable.

My father’s weather predictions were a touch unreliable, but we certainly became used to longer, colder winters in my boyhood. Very few years passed when my gang didn’t expect prolonged ice hockey games on the frozen waters of the Trent’s water meadows.

More reliable were his summer forecasts. ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight (dry, settled weather); red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning (rain on the way)’. I reckon that is pretty good. Better perhaps than ‘the oak before the ash, hardly a splash; ash before the oak, we’re in for a soak’. Well, maybe. But such expectations must have come from somewhere, sometime.

I reckon my generation, especially those who worked outside for decades of the 20th century, had detected something going on with our climate, starting – and worrying – 40 years ago. Hard to define, apart from the extreme events of drought, high temperatures, storms of wind and floods of rain, which are part of our climate, not just our weather. We foresters had developed a feel for change going on which was more subtle, and more troubling.

Father would view the catastrophic flooding in California and the unprecedented lows in Alabama as harbingers of doom, asking: “When will it be our turn for a disaster?”

My mother was a staunch Yorkshirewoman with little time for southerners (starting with those born just north of the Trent). Her origins in the high Pennines gave her a code of somewhat spartan expectations.

As a child I wasn’t allowed to have a cold and a headache was considered something that softies in London suffered from. Not proper people. Not Yorkshire people. Perhaps this made me ultra sensitive to my environment, but the winter landscape there, ‘oop North’, always seemed to feature snow and lots of it. We sledged down hills on home-made toboggans and used a wooden puck cut from round sections of a big lime tree growing at the bottom of our garden for our ice-hockey games.

All this introspection was surely triggered by my walk along the riverside with the dogs on a white, frosty morning. It’s been a cold night – minus four. I shall warm myself by cutting firewood, a good healthy occupation that even a Yorkshirewoman would approve of. And our younger dog has just killed a rabbit with myxi (is that how you spell it?). Anyhow, it’s ‘as dead as a doornail’, another of my mother’s mysterious adages.

She would sometimes join us sledging down the hills, much to the delight of my gang. Her warning cry was even more mysterious. “Woo, Veroocks,” she would shout. Now where on earth did she get that from?

Well, the forecast is cold, Arctic air flooding down from the North. Could be wintry showers.

Keep yourselves warm.