There is a word for northern German weather, in Plattdeutsch (low German, old German dialect), and it is Schietwetter, or shitweather. It is one word, not shit weather, just plain shitweather. And shitweather is cold, grey, rainy, stormy, miserable, shitty, awful, grey, did I say grey, weather. There is a joke here, which I have also heard told of Chicago, that we only have two seasons in Northern Germany, winter (shitweather) and July.
Which makes the people living on the Baltic Sea behave differently to those, let’s say, living on Caribbean islands, when it comes our reaction to good weather. If sunny warm weather happens any time unexpectedly (i.e. other than in July) those of us up north close up the office, cancel all appointments and head off to the beach, or into the woods, or, at the very least, call up a few friends and lounge around in the garden with a bottomless pot of coffee and a giggly sense of having grasped a stolen moment.
It is one of those sunny days today. Not only did I take the long scenic route on my bicycle to work this morning, but I did so on the way home as well. What is usually a quiet solitary ramble through nature turned into a fiasco of grandmas on bicycles (baskets loaded with ripe pears and apples from their allotment gardens) over-taking everyone in sight, lovers picnicking along the riverside, teenagers taking their dogs for long walks, mothers with small children playing ball in a field, other fair-weather cyclists crowding the narrow pathway. It was an absolute delight! Praise the gods for such wonders!
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