A Somerset Lad

“My Nan left me a barometer in her will. I have it hung on the wall and I tap it and announce to my family that the needle is going up or down. I haven’t a clue what it means.”

The message read out on the breakfast show would have found a resonance with many listeners for whom a barometer on the wall was a common sight in younger days.

The barometer occupied a place of importance inside the front door of the farmhouse. It was in the corridor in there was also the hall stand upon which rested the black Bakelite telephone. The number, Long Sutton 217, was easily remembered, it was recited every time there was a call.

The barometer was treated with a sense of gravity comparable with that with which the telephone was answered. Each morning my grandmother would tap on the glass of the barometer that hung on the wall of the farmhouse and ponder the result with a serious air.

Falling pressure meant the approach of changeable weather. In Somerset changeable weather meant rain and rain might mean the loss of hay or harvest.

It was not as though the weather forecast was not listened to on the wireless in the kitchen at breakfast and lunchtimes, or watched on the television evening news on the television in the sitting room. Certainly, weather forecasts lacked the accuracy of those now constantly available online, but how was the daily check on the barometer any more accurate?

Perhaps my grandmother had read the hall barometer for so many years that even the slightest fall or rise of the needle was enough to tell her the prospects for day ahead. To have looked out of the kitchen window would only have confirmed what the needle had told her.

On a small farm, where money was not plentiful and where mistakes could make the difference between a small profit and a significant loss, my grandmother could have given a ready explanation for the seriousness with which she approached the daily tap on the glass.

Presumably, before people’s Nans had barometers, there were numerous local ways of telling what the weather might be, ways passed down from generation to generation.

With three different weather apps on my phone, I would feel no need to tap the glass of a barometer, even if I possessed one. In a generation’s time, will anyone remember the significant part they once played in people’s lives?

It is the anniversary of the publication of one of the most popular of children’s books of all time. On this day in 1908. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows was published. It has remained in print ever since.

It is fifty years since I first read it, there are lines that still remain fresh in the mind from that first reading.

The ever buoyant Rat and the depressive pessimist Mole have gone to Mole’s house, from which Mole has been absent for some time. They make a good fist of restoring it to a homely condition, but Mole is then hit by a dark wave.

Mole promptly had another fit of the blues, dropping down on a couch in dark despair and burying his face in his duster. “Rat,” he moaned, “how about your supper, you poor, cold, hungry, weary animal? I’ve nothing to give you – nothing – not a crumb!”

“What a fellow you are for giving in!” said the Rat reproachfully. “Why, only just now I saw a sardine-opener on the kitchen dresser, quite distinctly; and everybody knows that means there are sardines about somewhere in the neighbourhood. Rouse yourself! pull yourself together, and come with me and forage.”

They went and foraged accordingly, hunting through every cupboard and turning out every drawer. The result was not so very depressing after all, though of course it might have been better; a tin of sardines, a box of captain’s biscuits, nearly full, and a German sausage encased in silver paper.

“There’s a banquet for you!” observed the Rat, as he arranged the table. “I know some animals who would give their ears to be sitting down to supper with us to-night!”

“No bread!” groaned the Mole dolorously; “no butter, no–”

“No pate de foie gras, no champagne!” continued the Rat, grinning. “And that reminds me, what’s that little door at the end of the passage? Your cellar, of course! Every luxury in this house! Just you wait a minute.”

He made for the cellar-door, and presently reappeared, somewhat dusty, with a bottle of beer in each paw and another under each arm, “Self-indulgent beggar you seem to be, Mole,” he observed. “Deny yourself nothing. This is really the jolliest little place I ever was in.

As someone of a Moleish rather than a rodentine persuasion, there is a tendency to note the half empty glasses, to see the cloud around every silver lining.  But I am glad I also have Rat moments, those times when there is great delight in small things.