Five-and-a-half degrees at 8:30am. Misty.
The last three days of January are in Italy traditionally considered to be the coldest of winter.
They are known in Italian as i giorni della merla, blackbird days. Why? The simple version of the story goes that once blackbirds were white. One day in a very cold January, a mother blackbird took refuge from the cold with her little ones in a nice, warm chimney. When they emerged on February 1st, they were all black with soot and blackbirds have been, well, black birds ever since.
Now according to the UK Met Office, January is the coldest month of the Milanese year (no figures for Lago Maggiore I'm afraid...I think there's another job opportunity there). The Met Office list an average minimum temperature of -1.9°C and an average maximum of 4.6°C for the month. Now, I clocked 31°C in the sun at 12 midday yesterday (about 80°F), and an only-faintly-less-astonishing 9°C a few minutes after the sun peeped over the mountains across in Lombardy earlier in the morning.
Which sort of skews everything I'd say.
Perhaps in due climate-change course, the blackbirds in these parts will again change their colour. This time from black to tropical turquoise? And I wonder what picturesque little story will be invented to explain the change away...
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Tuesday 29 January 2008
I giorni della merla
Five-and-a-half degrees at 8:30am. Misty.
The last three days of January are in Italy traditionally considered to be the coldest of winter.
They are known in Italian as i giorni della merla, blackbird days. Why? The simple version of the story goes that once blackbirds were white. One day in a very cold January, a mother blackbird took refuge from the cold with her little ones in a nice, warm chimney. When they emerged on February 1st, they were all black with soot and blackbirds have been, well, black birds ever since.
Now according to the UK Met Office, January is the coldest month of the Milanese year (no figures for Lago Maggiore I'm afraid...I think there's another job opportunity there). The Met Office list an average minimum temperature of -1.9°C and an average maximum of 4.6°C for the month. Now, I clocked 31°C in the sun at 12 midday yesterday (about 80°F), and an only-faintly-less-astonishing 9°C a few minutes after the sun peeped over the mountains across in Lombardy earlier in the morning.
Which sort of skews everything I'd say.
Perhaps in due climate-change course, the blackbirds in these parts will again change their colour. This time from black to tropical turquoise? And I wonder what picturesque little story will be invented to explain the change away...
The last three days of January are in Italy traditionally considered to be the coldest of winter.
They are known in Italian as i giorni della merla, blackbird days. Why? The simple version of the story goes that once blackbirds were white. One day in a very cold January, a mother blackbird took refuge from the cold with her little ones in a nice, warm chimney. When they emerged on February 1st, they were all black with soot and blackbirds have been, well, black birds ever since.
Now according to the UK Met Office, January is the coldest month of the Milanese year (no figures for Lago Maggiore I'm afraid...I think there's another job opportunity there). The Met Office list an average minimum temperature of -1.9°C and an average maximum of 4.6°C for the month. Now, I clocked 31°C in the sun at 12 midday yesterday (about 80°F), and an only-faintly-less-astonishing 9°C a few minutes after the sun peeped over the mountains across in Lombardy earlier in the morning.
Which sort of skews everything I'd say.
Perhaps in due climate-change course, the blackbirds in these parts will again change their colour. This time from black to tropical turquoise? And I wonder what picturesque little story will be invented to explain the change away...
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