Week 6

An icy full moon; not haar; the cooperation of the moon and the sun

What a stunner of a week it has been here. Full moon nights and clear, crisp days. It’s been a beauty. Needed, after last week’s dreariness.

A quick re-cap for newcomers: in this weekly post I tell you about three seasonal things I have noticed this week, things that made this week of the year particularly…this week. And then you tell me yours. It’s an exercise, I suppose, in noticing, in not letting any moment of the year slip by unremarked, in looking for beauty even where and when you least expect it (FEBRUARY, for instance), but it’s also just created a lovely community coming together and I really look forward to catching up with what has been going on in your gardens and walks, and the news from your Paris cafes/Colorado fields/Scottish lochs/Birmingham allotments etc… each week.

I begin each post with a round up of your previous week’s comments. So here, first, is your week 5:

The comfort and peace of winter darkness; wassailing in a field with hot mulled apple juice; a (now) traditional Imbolc fondue; purple violas and irises growing in pots on the steps of a stately home; merry dunnocks, bare bramble arches and the smell of sweet box; making a Brigid’s cross to hang in a willow tree along with a shawl (Brat Bhride) for Brigid to bless, should she pass by; the Chinese New Year parade in Paris’s 13e arrondissement; a garden full of birds - robins, blackbirds, jackdaws, sparrows, a few doves and pigeons; blue tits inspecting the nest box in the tree nearest the house; an Imbolc fire ceremony; yellow aconites, white snowdrops and purple crocuses and rosemary enhancing the winter palette of black and brown; a seasonal cold; a late batch of marmalade; raucous party noises at the frog pond; seasonal apricity; the first song thrush of the year giving a front row concert, then a face to face meeting with a confident goldcrest; lots of us discovering our inner galanthophile.

Thank you all so much! It’s amazing how even at this time when it feels like nothing is moving, that already feels so ‘last week’.

Here’s my week 6:

An icy full moon

I suppose that having been given a choice of three names - Ice Moon, Snow Moon and Storm Moon - February’s full moon is almost bound to hit one of them square. If memory serves (and it often doesn’t so don’t quote me) last February there was a storm ON the day of February’s full moon, which made it feel like a proper weather divining device. I don’t think that is what these names are supposed to do…BUT…it had been fairly mild before the night of the full moon and then in the morning there was ice on the ground, so what do I know. Anyway I can never get a decent photo of the moon but I was out in the night and saw it through this tree and I kind of like this.

Not haar, but…

I lived in Edinburgh for a while and there they have a weather phenomenon called the haar. It is a sea mist, which wikipedia tells me is a feature of the east coast of Britain between April and September, occurring when warm air passes over the cold North Sea. The notable thing about it is that it comes all at once. Sometimes out of a blue sky there is suddenly a patch of very dense fog - in my memory (again, pinch of salt…) I see it billowing around the corners of Edinburgh New Town squares.

I was walking up through the park the other morning and all was clear and blue skied and then suddenly one side of the park became misty. I thought about taking a picture on my way home but luckily turned and took this snap, and you can almost see it rolling in, particularly in the sky. By the time I had walked around the second field and was on my way home, all was crisp and clear again, not a trace of mist. That same day I had to go to London and it happened again, much more dramatically, on the train ride - we were suddenly plunged into thick mist, and then out again into beautiful blue skies. So there have been some patches of something a bit haar-like floating around some unlikely places this week.

The cooperation of the moon and the sun

The following morning I was walking along the Thames near Battersea Power Station and noticed this big stretch of beach. I’m not in London often enough to know what particular bits normally look like but it seemed unusual to me. Looking it up when I got home I see that I happened to be walking past within half an hour of the low tide. And it following just a couple of days after the full moon, this was a spring tide.

Tides are caused by the water of the earth bulging towards the moon as it passes, and they become more extreme just after a new moon and a full moon, when the sun and the moon are in line with each other. This causes spring tides, with higher highs and lower lows. This, it turns out, was the lowest of the month, at just .54m. I hope the mudlarkers were out elsewhere along the shore. What luck to be passing then, to see the action of the moon and the sun on this huge body of water.

(I spot a quick chance for a plug here - all of the year’s spring tides, along with a method for finding your local tide times, including those at London Bridge, are included in The Almanac 2023!)

That’s my week. Please tell me about yours. What have you noticed that felt particularly seasonal or notable as ‘this week’ this week? And don’t forget to save up your pics for our lovely Sunday chat too…