Joe Shute has traveled all over Britain discovering how our seasons
are changing, causing havoc with nature and affecting our lives.
The changing seasons have shaped all of our lives, but what happens when
the weather changes beyond recognition?
Joe Shute has spent years unpicking Britain's long-standing love affair
with the weather. He has pored over the literature, art and music our
weather systems have inspired and trawled through centuries of
established folklore to discover the curious customs and rituals we have
created in response to the seasons. But in recent years Shute has
discovered a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster
and far more profoundly than we realise. Daffodils in December,
frogspawn in November and summers so hot wildfires rampage across the
northern moors.
Shute has travelled all over Britain discovering how our seasons are
warping, causing havoc with nature and affecting all our lives. He has
trudged through the severe devastation caused by increasingly frequent
flooding and visited the Northamptonshire village once dependent on hard
frosts for its slate quarrying industry now forced to invest in
industrial freezers due to our ever-warming winters. Even the very
language we use to describe the weather, he has discovered, is changing
in the modern age.
This book aims to bridge the void between our cultural expectation of
the seasons and what they are actually doing. To follow the march of the
seasons up and down the country and document how their changing patterns
affect the natural world and all of our lives. And to discover what
happens to centuries of folklore, identity and memory when the very
thing they subsist on is changing for good.
