Red in the face

My mum was unhappy about the heat in St Ives, in Huntingdonshire, unbearable she said. Somebody here in Pinoso was complaining to me about how hot it was too but, because I keep a little record in my diary, I thought I was aware that, so far, both June and July have been a little cooler than usual.

So I did a bit of checking. I was a bit surprised how difficult it was to find full sets of data for past years  and I could only really get fullish sets for 2013, 2014 and most of 2015. All of these results are from the same weather station so any microclimatic differences are evened out. And it seems to be true. Both June and July this year (so far) have had lower maximum temperatures than in the previous quoted years. Mind you the difference isn't really that much and the nightime temperatures are much as usual.

In 2013 in Pinoso the highest June temperature was 35ºC, for 2014 it was 32.5ºC, for 2015 it was 37ºC and for 2018 it was 31.5ºC
In 2013 in Pinoso the highest July temperature was 36.5ºC, for 2014 it was 35ºC, for 2015 the records are missing and for 2018, so far, the highest is 33.5ºC

In 2013 in Pinoso the lowest June temperature was 8ºC, for 2014 it was 7ºC, for 2015 it was 9.5ºC and for 2018 it was 8.5ºC
In 2013 in Pinoso the lowest July temperature was 12ºC, for 2014 it was 11.5ºC, for 2015 the records are missing and for 2018, so far, the lowest is 12ºC

Colder than a well-digger's ass

I have a morning cat feeding routine. The kettle goes on as I run water to wash the cats' bowls. I fire up the portable gas heater. When the water has boiled I put a little of it into our tea mugs and then put the mugs on top of the heater. It's to warm the cups. If we don't warm the cups we end up with lukewarm tea. The kitchen temperature is such that crockery and cutlery come out of the cupboards icy cold.

The minimum temperatures recorded at the Pinoso weather station over the last week are -1.5ºC, -2ºC, -1.1ºC. -2ºC, +1.3ºC, -7.2ºC and -5.3ºC. It's not that they're arctic or anything but neither are they tropical. It has been colder. We had a couple of days last month when there was no morning water because of frozen pipes. Lots of shop and office workers in Pinoso work at their computers wearing coats. Several of our friends wear fleeces inside their houses. We're not for that. We're for banging on the heating. Maggie was so fed up of being cold a couple of years ago that she spent serious money on installing a pellet burner which now blasts 10kw of heat into our living room. We have portable 4kw gas heaters in the kitchen and as a back up in the living room too and there are electric heaters here and there. Since the temperatures began to drop we've bought ten 12kg gas bottles, twenty odd 15kg sacks of pellets and our December electric bill is 50% higher than the one in November.

The problem is that the heat is not background heat. It isn't on all the time. The insulation in our house, and in the majority of the Spanish houses that we know in this area, is so minimal that basically as heat is poured in it flies out. As soon as we turn off the heating the cold re-invades the house and, even when the heating is on in any one room the icy cold chill is waiting behind the door.

We don't leave heating on in the bedroom. The goose down duvet we use is really a set of a thinner and a thicker quilt. The two will fasten together and that's what we do in the depths of winter. It means that we can stay warm in bed. In fact it's a bit too hot and the duvet is uncomfortably heavy. I think we both follow the same routine. We wake up at something a.m. dripping in sweat, far too hot, we stick an arm or a leg out from under the covers till the exposed limb goes numb with cold and then we retreat under the covers and hope that the balance of body temperatures will allow us to get back to sleep.

Outside the daytime temperature is generally quite pleasant. I've thought that it has been colder recently than usual although I have no data to back up that. I'm just going on things like the feeling that I might die of cold as I rode the bike into work the other morning! If I were describing a typical winter's day around here I would describe a sunny day with a bright blue sky so the recent crop of grey days has been a bit out of character.

As I pick up a freezing cold knife from the cutlery drawer or as I gasp with cold on opening the door to the unheated office it's hard to recall those endlessly hot summer days when the cicadas sang all night long. But, what keeps me going is that I know they'll be back!

The crickets still sing in October

We've had some decent weather until recently - in fact I keep hearing how it has been unseasonably mild and suchlike. That may be true, they, whoever they are, may have reasons for lying to me about all sorts of things but I'm sure that the weather isn't one of them. So, if they say it's been a warmer Autumn than usual I am happy to believe them. 

It's started to cool down now though. For the past couple of weeks, we have sometimes turned on one of the butane heaters in our living room just to take the chill off. We put the slightly thicker duvet on the bed too and I've put some pullovers back into my wardrobe. Yesterday Maggie said it was cold so I trundled another heater into the kitchen just in case. She even fired up the pellet burning stove for our telly watching last night. We are right on the cusp of it getting cold. Inside, in our bit of Spain, over the late autumn and winter it can be unpleasantly unpleasant in our house when the heating isn't on. Outside of course it's nice, or at least it's usually nice. Cloudless blue skies and sun being the standard.

Oddly enough the Town Hall website just published the round-up of the October weather. They used to do the monthly report without fail but I haven't seen it for a while so here, for your delight, is the October 2017 Pinoso weather.

The highest temperature on the 27th was 29ºC and the lowest, of 5ºC, was overnight on the 26th/27th. So quite a temperature range on the 27th! The median daytime maximum through October was 23.7ºC and the median minimum was 8.8ºC.

We had just one rainy day but, on that day, the 18th, we got 16.5 litres of rain per square metre. That day was also classed as stormy because we had gusts of wind of up to 87km/h.

We had five misty starts and 26 mornings with dew but 22 of those turned into clear sunny days and there were another five with sunny spells.

All in all then the sun shone for 27 out of 31 days, the standard daytime temperature was in the mid 20s and it only rained once. That does sound like a pretty decent October then.