Forecast: A Diary of the Lost Seasons is Joe Shute’s tracing of the history of how our weather is changing, as he travels across Britain looking at daffodils in December, frogspawn in November, swallows that no longer fly home – and floods, wildfires and winters without snow.
Nothing is now behaving as it should, in this nod to how weather changes are reshaping our world (and our cultures and memories – as the very thing they subsist on is slipping away).
I had come here hoping to see swallows. The Peak District often swirls with them in the summer months, though I had never spotted them quite so early before. The poet Ted Hughes’ oft-quoted line about swifts is equally applicable to their hirundine cousins, the swallow. Their return marks a sense that the world is still working.
About the Author
Joe Shute is a writer and journalist with a passion for the natural world. He writes features for The Daily Telegraph and is the newspaper’s long-standing ‘Weather Watch’ columnist.
