Epea Pteroenta

As a Greek ex-pat in the UK, I claim weather opinions as a specialty. Respect my authoritay!

English weather

I've been called crazy to my face for moving from Greece to the UK. Clearly, someone who leaves the land of the bluest skies for the most proverbially variable weather in Europe, if not worldwide, must have taken leave of her senses first, right?

Well, no.

There was much more than the weather involved in my decision to move, like for everyone else (if you know anyone who can afford to pick their residence by weather alone, point them out to me; I need to find out how to become a lady of such leisure myself). As far as the weather goes, though, neither country is quite like the stereotypes. Shocking, I know.

Yes, Greek weather is milder than anything I could find in the UK. To claim that it never rains is an exaggeration, but we do get at least 300 days of sunshine a year. The sky is really bluer than it can ever be here in the north, and the sun brighter, but after a point, those very characteristics used to become the bane of my existence. In and around Athens, at least, where I lived most of my life, we simply didn't get enough rain – and what rain we did get used to fall in buckets, creating flash floods that made the life of entire neighbourhoods a misery. In summer, the temperature would rise to baking point – it's a cool summer if it doesn't go over 40C – and the sun doesn't feel friendly at all under such circumstances. The price of keeping the indoors air-conditioned is making the outdoors even more unbearable, and the summers are, slowly but steadily, growing longer. Halloween in T-shirts is less fun than it sounds, especially if one has had nearly six months of that kind of heat already.

On the other hand, at least my part of the UK is neither grey nor wet. Here in the east, we're on the wrong side of the mountains for rain. Of course the 'less rainfall than the Sahara' line is blatantly untrue, but we can go weeks in a row without rain in the warm half of the year. Nothing like, say, Stornoway, which I've never seen without rain on the weather report. The winter is cold, but we only get a handful of snow days (though even those are enough to bring everything to a grinding halt), usually in January – it has happened twice in the four winters I've spent here. Summers are cool, and I usually need a light coat even when everyone else is in tank tops, but I can live with that. If it gets really hot (and 25-30C is really hot here), the humidity makes it stifling.

From all this it is obvious that I can cope with cold much better than with heat. No matter how cold it gets, there is always a heating system, central or otherwise (and believe me here; I spent two winters depending on a portable space heater rather than central heating, with not much discomfort), and more clothes to pile on. While, when it gets hot, one can only strip down to the skin, which is not even appropriate for anywhere but within one's own walls. Even in the worst of times, I don't risk frostbite here; while I'm fair game for heat exhaustion at best, and lethal sunstroke or heatstroke at worst there.

I don't think I'm going to visit back home in August again (not after the exhaustion of last year). From now on, only between October and April. And when I'm independently wealthy, I'll be spending the whole winter in Athens, every year. That would take care of the issue of having to be out and about in the rain.