Dear Readers, what a strange spring and summer we’ve had here in the UK – in East Finchley it’s been an unseasonably cold, wet spring, followed by a few days of ‘summer’, followed by chill and yesterday what I can only describe as a deluge. We have a couple of skylights in our house, and the sound of the rain racketing down provided an interesting backdrop to my uncomfortable attempts to get to sleep.

On that subject, I get a few more minutes of sleep every night, but there is much tossing and turning involved. I wonder if bone heals more at night, hence the pain? I have discovered that an ice pack helps, but of course you can only put it on one ‘spot’ at a time. Oh well. The trajectory is  definitely going in the right direction, and I shall have to be as patient and accepting as possible. On the bright side, I have a physiotherapy appointment at the Whittington on Thursday, which is ridiculously quick. I shall let you know how it goes.

Anyhow, yesterday was a very bad day to get a lot of rain, as 15th July is St Swithin’s Day, and the legend is that if it rains on this day, we will be in for a subsequent forty wet days.

“St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain

Full forty days, it will remain

St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair

For forty days, t’will rain no more”

But who was St Swithin, and what’s his link to the weather?

Portrait of St Swithun from the illuminated Benedictional of St Aethelwold (c. 970 AD) (Public Domain)

St Swithin (or St Swithun in the original Anglo-Saxon) was the Bishop and subsequently the patron saint of Winchester Cathedral. He died in 863, with nary a mention of him in any of the contemporary accounts. However, after he was made Patron Saint in 971, chroniclers rushed to find stories of his goodness and saintly status. He was said to have given feasts to which he only invited the poor, not the rich. He also apparently repaired a basket of eggs that a poor woman had dropped – when St Swithun heard her cries of despair, he made the eggs whole. This is the only miracle performed during his lifetime, but, on being invoked by Anglo-Saxon Queen Emma, unjustly accused of adultery, he is said to have protected her when she went through a trial by ordeal, which involved walking on hot irons – on examination afterwards, her feet were uninjured. I love that in this story Emma’s son, who was the King and the man who had accused her of being unfaithful to his father, gets whipped around the place by his mother. That’ll teach him.

Queen Emma being led across the hot coals

The weather link is, as all things, disputed, but the most frequently-cited version of the legend states that St Swithin asked for his grave to be made outside the cathedral ‘where it might be subject to the feet of passers-by and to the raindrops pouring from on high’. And so it was, until 971 when, in keeping with his new Patron Saint status, his remains were transferred into the cathedral. Alas, he showed his displeasure with a mighty shower of rain that continued for days, and so the legend of the 40 days and 40 nights was born.

Is it accurate, though? It is true that the jetstream has historically settled down in about the middle of July – if it’s to the north of the country, it’s likely to bring high pressure and warm, dry conditions, while if it’s to the south, Atlantic weather systems predominate. It’s never been known to rain for a whole forty days and nights following 15th July, and indeed in 1913 a 15-hour rainstorm was followed by 30 dry days, whilst in 1924 a beautiful day with 13.5 hours of sunshine was followed by 30 wet days out of 40.

It’s interesting to note that St Swithin is also the patron saint of drought. I suspect he has his work cut out for him these days.

Statue of St Swithin in the crypt at Winchester Cathedral (Photo By David Spender – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dspender/2972072348/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20264529)

So all this gets me to thinking about local weather legends. I know about the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil in the US, who is said to predict an early spring (or not) by whether or not he casts a shadow on emerging from his den. What he does is subject to interpretation by the ‘Inner Circle’ who interact with him on the day (2nd February) – they claim that Phil is 100% correct in his weather predictions, while more sceptical observers put the figure at between 35 and 41 %.

Punxsutawney Phil in 2018 (Photo Chris Flook, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

How about where you live though? Did your mother ever look at the bushes, covered in berries, and announce that it was going to be a hard winter? My mother always claimed that her migraines were brought on by incipient thunderstorms, and my nan said she could predict wet weather on the way when her arthritis played up. Let me know if you have any local/family weather predictions, and how accurate you think they were.