Melancholy autumn mood, Łazienki

Must have been the wettest September since moving to Poland. Cool damp weather pervades. This morning, the second in a row, my day starts at Łazienki Park with a business breakfast at the Belvedere restaurant. This gives me the chance to stroll through my favourite Warsaw park, though the mood is most melancholy.

Summer has ended. Best submit to the melancholia, wallow in it for a while - for it will pass. Spring will return, one's mood will lift. Before then of course, there will be joyous days of autumnal and winter sunshine. Poles tend to suffer more than Brits from changes in meteorological conditions, as I've mentioned before. At first after moving to Poland, I found it hard to believe that the radio and TV weather forecasters talking about niekorzystne warunki biometeorologiczne was anything other than quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo. After all, if in Britain (or Ireland!) the weathermen keeps on saying that heavily overcast skies and low atmospheric pressure mean you'd be feeling low, a state of profound torpor would soon set in. Apathetic lethargy, sluggishness and langour. Yet despite its climate, Britain managed (for a time) to have the world's largest empire.

Have the inhabitants of the British Isles become acclimatised to prevailing dullness and damp? The longer I'm here in Poland, the more I'm beginning to think there's something in it.

Weather patterns here are more stable than on the western fringes of our continent. So when bad weather sets in, it hangs around for a week or more. It's unusual to have four days of glorious sunshine interrupted by a day of rain. I'm still intrigued as to whether the melancholia set off by bad weather is due to a) lack of sunlight on the brain = fewer endorphins being produced, or b) low atmospheric pressure acting upon our circulation. Or both a) and b).

Above: 'Caesar adsum iam forte, Pompei adsum tu'. Anyone else remember that? Below: portrait of a peahen and her offspring, bedraggled in the rain.

The park is still beautiful when cloaked in low cloud and drizzle; my mood will lift with the coming of sunshine.

Sunshine brings out the best in everything

Since sliding gently from summer into autumn on Wednesday, the weather has been perfect. Today, the sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky with the temperature reaching an extremely pleasant +22C. Just before leaving home this morning, I espied the neighbour across the road exercising his flock of pigeons.

Round and round they flew, and as their wings caught the direct blast of the sun's rays, there was a sudden flash of purest white that a moment later disappeared as the birds darted up at a different angle. A most beautiful sight at any time of the year, but one predicated by the brilliance of a blue sky as background and a lack of clouds occluding the sun.

Do the birds feel the same joy as we humans do in the presence of the sun? Is it sunlight or high air pressure accompanying cloudless skies that raises our spirits? I would posit that all surface-dwelling creatures within our universe feel elation in the vigorous presence of their local star's benign rays. Not burning at this time of year, but warming and life-enhancing. Look at the spiders in their webs (nowhere nearly as big this year as they were last year), ants and beetles. All seem to express greater joy and vibrance in their movements when the sun shines on their backs.

Incidentally, the pictures above are 'as was' without any tweaking whatsoever in Photoshop - and no polarising filter. The sky was indeed this blue. Nikkor 80-400mm at 400mm.

Blue Monday

Three years ago, Dr Cliff Arnall from the University of Cardiff, calculated an algorithm suggesting that in 2008, Monday 21 January would be the most depressing day of the year. The co-relation between dark, depressing weather, the long wait until spring arrives, post-Xmas debt, all conspire between them to lower spirits across the Northern Hemisphere. (He also worked out that the happiest day of the year is in late June.) 

And talking of darkness, today is a full month after the winter solstice, and there's only 45 minutes more daylight than on the shortest day. Two months to equinox, and there's still three and half hours to make up to the full 12 hours. 

Back in the early 1980s, I observed a co-relation between the weather and movements on the London Stock Exchange. We had in the office an old Press Association newswire machine, printing out data all day long. When the weather was nice, the market indices had a habit of rising, and vice versa. The tendency was weak, but I'd guess that if you had to make a bet on which way the markets were moving just on the basis of weather, you'd get it right - consistently - 52 times out of 100. Add a bit of market insight to the weather data, and you could get 55 out of 100. Enough to make a small profit. If I had posited such a theory 25 years ago, I would have been accused of being a swivel-eyed, tin-foil-hat-wearing nutter; today, the link between economics and human biometerology has been noted. 

Anyway, yesterday, the combination of 'Blue Monday' and dire sentiments on the financial markets led to what portal Money.pl called 'financial apocalypse'. The main Warsaw index lost 5.5% in one day, while shares in London lost £77 billion in value. Less in percentage terms than Warsaw, but London's brokers are more experienced and have been through those situations when panic breaks loose, prices are in free-fall and they've already lost their clients significant chunks of their personal wealth. 

In Warsaw, the fundamentals should have been good enough to keep the market afloat. Yesterday the IMF uprated Poland's GDP growth prospects for 2008 upwards from 4.2% to 5%. That really is good news. Yet the shares kept on tanking. It must have been the weather - "It rained and it rained. It rained both night and day. The people got worried; they began to cry. Lord have mercy, where can we go to now?" * 

Dr Cliff should have noted that 21 January 2008 is Martin Luther King Day in the US, and that Wall Street would be closed. I watch with interest as to what will happen on the world's financial markets today. Here in Warsaw, it's still raining. Below: ul. Poloneza, submerged.

  * John Lee Hooker, Tupelo

Not In My Back Yard

Ul. Poleczki, which I consider to the northern border of my patch, offers this picture of what happens when the March of Progress ends up in one's back yard. Yesterday we learned that Pan Winkler's field behind our house has been granted planning permission for 12 detached houses. OK, it's not a telecoms centre (see above). Another such centre sprouted up behind the back garden of the house we rented on ul. Gajdy, so we've experienced having a building site in our immediate neighbourhood. Plus, the rural view from my bedroom window will disappear. "I remember when this was all fields" I will someday say to my grandchildren and they won't believe me.

Weather-wise, the last two weeks have been dull and gloomy. Temperatures between 0C and +3C, not cold enough to be crisp and frosty, but cold nonetheless. Three weeks after the clocks changed, we're back to waking up in darkness. And it gets dark around 4.00pm. The sun, when it makes a rare appearance, does so while I'm at work. This leads to what Poles label 'zle samopoczucie'. The standard remedy is to take magnez (magnesium). I need cheering up. My soul is heavy.

What a difference a day makes

Making my way from an early meeting back to the office, I find myself pondering on what constitutes an 'ordinary' day; the lifetime mean, the average. Think dull. This, I think, is it (above, ul. Poloneza). An overcast, damp, chilly Friday; heavy traffic, people in a rush. The flavour of everyday life, this is what people go on holiday to get away from.

In Poland, weather forecasters delight in telling their listeners of a 'niekorzystny stan biometeorologiczny', which means 'unfavourable bio-meteorological state'. Whenever the barometer falls, Polish offices and factories are full of lethargic people complaining that they can’t work effectively because of the low air pressure. They call themselves ‘cisnienowcy’ (‘those affected by [air] pressure’) or ‘meteopaci’ (‘those with weather sickness’). Should such medical conditions ever be discovered by British doctors and promoted incessantly by British weather forecasters, the UK's population would be moping around in a state of inertia most of the time, given the climate. (Above right:) Corner of ul. Pulawska and Plaskowickiej.

But a mere 24 hours later, I wake up to a cloudless sky and sunshine that brings out the gold in the autumn leaves. (Left:) The view from the kitchen window at ten to nine this morning. (Below:) The view of our garden from my bedroom window 20 minutes later.

My take on the 'science' of biometeorology (after 40 years in the UK and 10 years here) is that your emotional state when the weather is dull and overcast should be taken as the norm, whilst beautiful sunny days should be seen as uplifting and joyful. Even if they are more abundant here in Warsaw than in London. My belief is that it is sunlight, and the absense of it, rather than air pressure per se, that causes weather-related mood swings.

Meteopaci and ciśnieniowcy tend to believe that their maladies can be cured with magnez (magnesium), conveniently believed to exist in therapeutically-significant doses in both chocolate and cake.

It's not just a Poland thing though. The halny wind that blows down from the mountains causing headaches is the equivent of the German Föhn and the American Chinook. The French Mistral, confusingly, is said to bring good health.