A series of reflections on our national preoccupation with the weather, how we talk, write and fantasise about it. Discover William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy snuggling up into the same big overcoat. Ice-meteors, rains of herring and red Saharan dust. Seasonal Affective Disorder, weather forecaster scapegoating, and whether our national psyche is up to coping with climate change.

“Brilliantly illuminating” BBC Radio Pick of the Week

“Richard Mabey, our greatest nature writer… has always been an inordinately precise writer…the most beautiful sections of this book – and they really are exquisite – are memoir. The right weather at the right moment feels like a benediction… and the flipside of benediction is effrontery. How Mabey has managed to convey so elegantly the strange coexistence of both these things – and so much else besides – in 90 scanty pages is a mystery to me: a miracle on a par with a moonbow”. Rachel Cooke, The Observer.